Weary Monday. The Cook Out Clash was fantastic; shuttle-bus service not so much.
Shoehorned into a seat in the back of a tour bus serving as a shuttle -- more on that disaster later -- Donald Butler regaled his seatmates with a story about one of NASCAR's greatest champions while rolling toward Bowman Gray Stadium Sunday night.
Or more precisely his wife.
Butler, a lifelong NASCAR fan, manages the Bike Source, a bicycle shop in Charlotte that sells (and services) high-end road bikes popular with a number of drivers. Jimmie Johnson, Carl Edwards, Matt Kenseth and Ty Gibbs, to name four, turned to riding as a way to stay fit.
And Johnson, at least before he blew up in popularity during his seven Cup championships, was a customer. A good customer.
"One day Chandra (Johnson's wife) showed up in the shop out of nowhere," Butler said. "I knew who she was, her name anyway, but I didn't recognize her at first."
She was holding an expensive bike wheel that had clearly come in second in a recent battle with a vehicle. She'd hit one of Johnson's bicycles in their garage and was in a mild panic.
"She asked if there was any way we could replace it to where Jimmie wouldn't notice," Butler said. "We did pretty well and for a while thought we'd pulled it off."
A month or so later, though, the jig was up.
Johnson called the shop to ask about a $1,200 charge on his credit card. "I don't think he ever said a word to her about it," Butler said.
And without intending to, Butler illustrated a large part of NASCAR's appeal with a very large, very devoted fan base -- human connection.
Drivers, crew members and team-support personnel live, work and play in North Carolina and have done so since NASCAR's inception in 1948.
The racing circuit, in the event you either reside in a cave or just moved here yesterday, has deep roots in the state beginning with old-time bootleggers who'd souped up stock cars to run white lightning from the foothills to thirsty customers in N.C. cities and beyond.
Native Tarheels such as Junior Johnson and Richard Petty paid state taxes in the formative years of Cup racing, paving the way for latter day superstars such as Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. to move to mansions on Lake Norman.
Motorsports, with many of its biggest NASCAR teams having multi-million shops near Mooresville, has become a $6.2-billion industry in North Carolina -- a fact driven home during the pandemic when state officials saw fit to invest $45 million of North Carolina's $5.7 billion share of federal relief funds into the state's tracks.
That includes some $18 million which directly led to the resurrection of the North Wilkesboro Speedway and a hugely successful two-year run of NASCAR's All-Star race at the famous ⅝-mile track.
Not known for being populated by dummies, NASCAR surely factored that success into its decision to run its season-opening exhibition race at Bowman Gray Stadium here in little old Winston-Salem Sunday night.
Fans from 44 states and five countries snapped up the 17,000 or so tickets for a chance to watch up close superstar drivers bump and grind their way around Bowman Gray's flat ¼-mile oval.
And judging solely by the enthusiasm in turn one where Donald Butler sat with three friends, the Cook Out Clash was a smashing success at the box office and for the local economy.
Diehards -- total strangers -- happily handed over $5 to draw driver numbers to get into a race pool, debated favorite drivers and took turns enthusiastically flipping the bird at the perceived villains.
The biggest heel of the night, at least in the eyes of the adoring mob, was Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who made the near unpardonable sin of crashing local legend Burt Myers into the wall deep in turn one during a last-chance qualifying race.
"By this point in the race, they're in retaliation mode," Butler said. "Some of them are thinking 'I'm not going to win, but you aren't either.'"
In-race grudges -- slights and breaches of etiquette from months or years earlier for that matter -- can result in crashes when drivers settle up. "These guys are like elephants," Butler explained. "They never forget anything."
Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | SoundStack | All Of Our Podcasts
That sense of frontier justice appeals to fans, too.
"I've never seen so many ... gestures," the in-stadium announcer intoned following Myers rude introduction to the new safer barrier wall. "The fans down there are letting that young man (Stenhouse) have it."
But that doesn't mean they weren't having fun, though.
At various points during frequent yellow-flag caution laps, fans in section 17 could learn that squeezing a few drops of Texas Pete hot sauce into Fireball liquor could make shots taste like atomic fireball cinnamon candy, that shooting bullets into paper targets isn't as much fun as plinking a spinning metal target and that a $10 beer on a chilly night goes down just right.
Myers, also without meaning to, summed up the weekend rather nicely during an on-camera interview streamed into Bowman Gray on supersized screens installed on two sides of the track.
"The experience was awesome," Myers said after being checked out by medics. "The orange car (Stenhouse) ran into me ... but it was an awesome experience. We had a great time."
The same could be said of the fans, too.
At least until the very end of the night when the shuttle bus service designed to ferry fans back to parking lots in the Innovation Quarter and Allegacy Field turned into an unorganized mosh pit.
Thousands of people pushed into one lane of Martin Luther King Boulevard jostling for seats within inches of moving buses
Officials had no easily discernible lines or patterns established. Beleaguered bus drivers stopped where they could, and a tour-bus employee with a walkie talkie appeared to give up while trying to establish order among tired fans -- some of whom waited an hour or more to get back to their cars.
A handful of off-duty cops who largely stood by and passively watched the jostling finally stepped in to direct traffic and began instructing drivers to move to the end of a line before opening their doors.
We'll never know whether that had anything to do with a heckler yelling, Hey ... You with the gun. Take control of this mess. But it didn't hurt, either.
Still, considering the hundreds of thousands of dollars that changed hands to fill the city's hotels, restaurants and bars over a festive weekend, even a poorly planned exit strategy only amounted to a mere annoyance.
"Maybe they'll sort this out next year," one weary fan said to no one in particular after plopping into a bus seat.
If NASCAR's track record is any indication, they surely will.
Defamation suit pulled
GREENSBORO -- Mark Robinson, the much ridiculed Republican candidate for governor, withdrew over the weekend his $50-million defamation lawsuit against CNN and announced that he had no desire to run for office again.
Which is not terribly surprising considering the nonstop cavalcade of bombshells that derailed his campaign.
"I will not run next year, nor do I have plans to seek elected office in the future," Robinson, a Republican, said on X, formerly Twitter, in a series of six posts that began around noon Friday.
It didn't really take Nostradamus or a degree in political science to see either development coming.
Robinson filed suit against CNN in October following an incendiary -- and extremely well-sourced -- report that Robinson allegedly wrote on the porn site Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012 while living near Colfax.
Among other gems, Robinson allegedly referred to himself as a "Black Nazi" and posited that he would like to own slaves himself while advocating for its return.
Robinson was soundly beaten by Gov. Josh Stein in November 54.9% to 40.1% even as President Trump carried the state by more than 3 percentage points.
(Which begs the question: What exactly was 40% of the electorate thinking? Was it a result of straight ticket voting, a show of force by low-information voters or something worse?)
At any rate, credible reports of being pro-Nazi and in favor of slavery would seem to be bridges too far.
ssexton@wsjournal.com
336-727-7481
@scottsextonwsj
Get local news delivered to your inbox!
Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter.
Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. ssexton Author email Follow ssexton Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification.
{{description}}
Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.
Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today