Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little

the backwoods of Maine throughout my childhood—I can’t say I’ve been a real aficionado of horsepower, either.

      The world of stock cars was new territory for me. But not for a large percentage of our population. NASCAR claims 75 million fans. During the nine months of the racing season, it’s second only to football as the most-viewed professional sport on TV. It broadcasts its races in more than 100 countries, and has speedways in Mexico and Canada. But by no means does it have an international ethos—NASCAR is as much an American export as are blue jeans, Coca-Cola, and cherry pie. The sport grew out of the 1930s Prohibition era in America’s Deep South, when rural bootleggers rigged standard-looking cars with high-powered engines to outrun the law. The forefathers of NASCAR, wrote historian Neal Thompson, were “a bunch of motherless, dirt-poor southern teens driving with the devil in jacked-up Fords full of corn whiskey—the best means of escape a southern boy could wish for.”

      Fans still cling to this unabashedly roughneck image. NASCAR’s feisty southern outlaw spirit was on full display at Talladega. Many in the overwhelmingly white crowd wore T-shirts and baseball caps featuring Confederate flags. “Redneck by Choice, Southern by the Grace of God” went the refrain on one such garment. “If You Don’t Like My Flag, You Can Kiss My Rebel Ass” went another. The sport’s macho undercurrent was also supersized at Talladega: while there were plenty of women in attendance, most of them seemed unfazed by the hand-scrawled signs reading “Show Us Your Tits.” (For that matter, one twentysomething in my vicinity was happy to comply.)

      The atmosphere was festive and—setting aside considerations of gender and racial demographics—even good-natured. Talladega had the carnival air you might find at a county fair, only a thousand times bigger. Concession booths with all-American delicacies were nearly as prevalent as the fans themselves—you couldn’t spit without hitting a purveyor of beer, corn dogs, fried chicken, or funnel cakes. (The speedway’s Web site notes that “12,000 pounds of Ballpark Franks are sold by concessions during a race weekend at Talladega, which when laid end-to-end, would circle the entire 2.66-mile track 1.14 times.”) After my $5 shower, pumped from a water tank by a purring diesel generator, I grabbed a double cheeseburger and followed the jostling crowd toward the track.

      PIT STOP

      At 1:00 p.m.—just after the national anthem blared over the loudspeakers and a squadron of B-1 bombers buzzed overhead—the green flag dropped. In seconds the chorus of twelve-cylinder combustion engines was echoing through the grandstands with a collective shriek as though the universe was being torn in two. Speed rumbled through the ground and into my bones, and my heart knocked against my rib cage. The air filled with the acrid odor of burnt rubber, hot asphalt, and spilled fuel.

      Hoping for an up-close, under-the-hood look at the action, I made my way into the pit—the restricted area in the center of the track where the cars are fueled and tuned between laps. The race car teams were assembled side by side along the track’s interior, each congregating in its own two-story open-air tent with VIP guests arrayed up top and the mechanics working below. A distinctive group of women who were predominantly blonde and trim—the wives of owners and drivers—sat perched in the VIP lounges wearing stiletto heels, shades, and cocktail gowns, sipping frosty drinks as they watched the action on the track.

      Each of the drivers has a pit crew of over a dozen mechanics responsible for gassing the cars, changing the tires, cooling the engines, and assessing track and vehicle conditions throughout the race. The mechanics were outfitted in helmets and matching Crayola-colored jumpsuits—cherry red, royal blue, canary yellow. Their polished metal tools—wrenches, jacks, pressurized gas pumps shaped like giant baby bottles—glinted in the sunlight. Covered in branded sponsor decals, the race cars themselves looked like a flotilla of Times Square billboards rocketing across the black pavement, flashing their chrome and rainbow colors against the sky.

      Roughly every forty laps, or when a hitch such as a flat tire occurred, the cars would come screeching in for pit stops. “Races are won and lost in the pit,” one fan explained to me. In an instant, the mechanics of each team would assemble into a collective organism around their car like an army of ants, everyone performing his own role within the whole in miraculous harmony. These technicians are exhaustively trained for their particular functions—cooling the radiator, jacking up the car, changing the tires, clearing the windshield, even hydrating the driver with a squeeze bottle. NASCAR mechanics, like most athletes, tend to be young. They practice their roles with Olympian rigor so they can perform with the utmost speed—trying to shave off fractions of a second to get their cars back in the race and ahead of the pack. I watched one hapless wheel changer who was small and wiry (these members of the team are almost always small and wiry, the better to crouch low and wrestle with lug nuts) lose control of the tire he was rolling toward a car. It slipped out of his reach and cost his team several seconds—the equivalent of perhaps a 50-yard advantage. That’s a big enough mistake to jeopardize his job and the six-figure salary that goes with it.

      So rhythmic and stylized was the event that the whole experience—even the smoldering car wrecks—felt choreographed, scripted, cinematic, like those set pieces from the classics of American cinema and TV in which motor vehicles have figured in the plots like main characters—The French Connection, The Great Escape, Bonnie and Clyde, Grease, American Graffiti, Easy Rider, The Dukes of Hazzard, Thelma and Louise. Only it takes a lot more fuel to keep this high-octane pageant in motion. How much, exactly?

      Between pit stops, as mechanics lounged on spare tires and casually dragged on cigarettes, I pressed them for some answers. The cars get anywhere from 4 to 7 miles per gallon, which means that in a 500-mile race such as this one, averaging 5 mpg, each car would consume roughly 100 gallons of fuel. Multiply that by forty-three cars per race, and each event as a whole consumes approximately 4,375 gallons of gasoline (assuming all cars finish). With about ninety-six U.S. NASCAR races per year spread out across several divisions, that totals over 1 million gallons (factoring practice rounds and adjusting for some shorter races).

      You also have to factor in the tires for every race. Several gallons of oil go into the production of a synthetic rubber tire. One car competing in a NASCAR event burns through forty to eighty tires per race. The fuel demands keep growing when you consider that there are more than a thousand other NASCAR-sanctioned races each year at affiliated tracks throughout the country. Additionally, each team has a convoy of eighteen-wheelers that hauls its race cars across the country from track to track, cumulatively traveling hundreds of thousands of miles per year. Fully loaded, these trucks get around 4.5 miles per gallon, which means that millions of gallons are consumed in just getting the cars to the races.

      These numbers are small when compared to the volume of fuel that goes into America’s military endeavors or our daily commutes, let alone our total oil demand. What’s fascinating about this particular form of fuel consumption is that its purpose is sheer entertainment. This is gas consumption as an art form. “Fans come here for speed,” as one mechanic put it to me, gesturing at the audience. “I don’t see many eco-greens in that crowd worryin’ about gas mileage.”

      As NASCAR fans enjoy the spectacle, they also participate in one of the most successful marketing platforms in the history of commerce. Drivers can pull in more than $30 million in annual commercial sponsorships. On one car alone I counted the insignia of more than twenty sponsors, including Mountain Dew, Chevrolet, 3M, Amp Energy, CompUSA, Budweiser, Sunoco, the American Automobile Association, and the National Guard, and there were over a dozen more—including Wrangler, Sprint, and Goodyear—affixed to the driver’s uniform. In total, four hundred companies spent more than $1.5 billion in 2008 to sponsor races, cars, and drivers.

      NASCAR drivers have been rolling platforms for advertisers since the earliest days of the sport. This marketing strategy gained traction when Detroit automakers noticed, as racing grew in popularity over the 1950s and ’60s, that American consumers would go in droves to their local car dealers the day after a race to buy the model of the winning vehicle. NASCAR entries are limited to certain approved “stock” cars—models that can be purchased at any standard dealership: the Chevrolet Monte Carlo, Ford Thunderbird, Pontiac Grand Prix, Dodge Charger, and Toyota Camry (only recently added to the otherwise all-American