Canter Bridge

My boss once jokingly told that’s what NASCAR is about: turn left and hit the gas.

Then I went to the Alllstate 400 at the Brickyard and now I’ve read Mark Martin’s Nascar for Dummies. It’s looking a little more complicated than fast left turns.

The author’s enthusiasm for the sport of NASCAR racing is contagious. As the driver of the Viagra-sponsored car #6 in the Nextel Cup series, he ought to know what he’s talking about from the inside out and about 188 mph.

Chapter 1 (‘NASCAR Racing-the best sport around’, pp. 9-24) tells you how men (well, mostly men) driving cars that look vaguely like your father’s Taurus ended up racing them around oval tracks in front of millions of spectators and television viewers and why you couldn’t possibly not be excited about this. Like most professional sports, NASCAR has acquired corporate sponsors. It is arguably the most logo-plastered sport in the world, a fact that Martin explores in ‘The Big Business of NASCAR’ (ch. 2, pp. 25-34). Martin convinces you that that’s a good thing, and before you know it, you know the primary car sponsors as well as the drivers and their car numbers.

The rest of the book takes you from zero to sixty in a fairly easy stretch of reading. If, like me, you started this book after attending a race or two and just getting at toe-hold on the sport, you won’t end up an expert. But you’ll be in good shape to understand the basics of every major area of the sport and to learn more as your exposure grows.

Mark Martin is not a great writer, but you don’t buy the Dummies series for great writing. You buy Tolstoy if you want great writing. What Martin effectively does is lets you know that there’s a whole lot more to NASCAR racing than you thought when you got yourself into this, but that you can learn a fair chunk of it pretty quickly. It’s also organized as a handy reference book for when you need to go back to look up a topic you breezed over a little quickly on the first go-around.

I bought this book because there’s a strong NASCAR culture in the company I joined. My boss sponsors the 18, driven by Bobby Labonte. See, I knew how to say that right. You can too. Buy the book.