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to get fired and Bill was getting old.”
    —JEREMY MAYFIELD
    asked why his and teammate Bill Elliott’s performances improved late in the 2003 season

I ’ve never understood why there seems to be some innate compulsion to ask journalists to predict things: races, games, champions, political outcomes, etc. No one should expect us to play Nostradamus. What I’m trained to do is write about what’s already happened. I don’t have dreams of the future. I don’t keep tea leaves handy. Normally, supernatural visions do not hover above my bed when I awaken in the middle of the night. Nature is usually what beckons when I awaken at such times. When someone—sadly, it’s often another journalist—asks me to predict the winner of the Nextel Cup championship, I do it but I don’t attach any particular importance to it.
    I have, however, thought about it, and what I’ve concluded is that picking the champion under the current system is patently ridiculous. It’s like deciding which numbers to select on a lottery ticket. Once the race-offs begin, it’s kind of a crapshoot. It seems to me, though, that a more valid assessment would be to pick which ten drivers will have a chance to win that pulse-quickening, spine-tingling, maddeningly unfair “Chase.”
    Getting in the top ten after twenty-six races is what counts. Then it’s a matter of getting hot, keeping the fenders uncrumpled, and hoping a rod doesn’t fly through the cylinder wall. In 2004, Jimmie Johnson won four of the final ten races, but that wasn’t enough to win the championship because Kurt Busch finished in the top ten in nine of them. Busch’s persistence and tenacity were admirable, but it didn’t hurt that, when the right front tire flew off his Taurus in the season’s final race, it conveniently did so at the mouth of pit road and the tire itself continued rolling down the frontstraight, thus bringing out a caution flag, while Busch was guiding the car three-wheeled into his pit stall.
    Making all the right moves isn’t enough. It takes a little Stardust.

    “It’s like you’re sitting in a parking lot, a lot of times in the middle of a parking lot … This parking lot just happens to be going really, really fast.”
    —KEN SCHRADER
    on racing at Talladega Superspeedway

    “It was too crazy for me, and I’m ’bout the craziest one out there.”
    —DALE EARNHARDT JR.
    after a Talladega race in 2003

    “If the Romans had any sense, they would’ve built Bristol instead of the Colosseum.”
    —O. BRUTON SMITH
    chairman, Speedway Motorsports Inc.

A merican sport has no more ambitious a leader than NASCAR chairman Brian Z. France, but the youthful leader of this still-burgeoning sport is not without his eccentricities. When he is speaking in front of an audience, France’s hand gestures can be metaphorically linked to a fifteen-car Talladega pileup.
    France, the grandson of NASCAR’s founder, makes frequent use of the old Bill Clinton thumbs-up gesture, but he has cultivated his own variations. Comparing the ex-president’s mannerisms to France’s is like comparing a triple-pump reverse dipsy-doo to a standard slam dunk. France is fond of firing the left thumb off to the side, making it appear as if he is referring to someone or something that invariably isn’t there. Sometimes he fires one hand jauntily while karate-chopping with the other. The words are fraught with euphemisms, but the hands are charismatic.
    When France steps up to a microphone, he sounds almost like he’s starring in an infomercial. NASCAR exists, he says, “to showcase the opportunities for the best drivers in the world to do their thing.” Those very same drivers invariably “step up to the plate” and “the more there is on the line,” the better they perform.
    Occasionally he misspeaks. In 2004, he noted that “it reeks [did he mean ‘wreaks’?] of the whole industry to be able to absorb that many changes.” Perhaps this was because “with momentum