In spite of some similarities between the accomplishments of Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt, their lives and influences on NASCAR show the changes in the sport from the 1960s to the 1990s.  Changes since the sixties include the shift from a largely local (southern) fanbase to the largest national fanbase for any American sport, despite fans' continued associations of the sport with a mythic southern past and good-ole-boy heroes.  The growth of NASCAR into a more nationalized sport is the direct result of the increased television coverage of races, and greater opportunities for corporate invovlment in the sport.  Today, many fans fear that the imagined southern community surrounding NASCAR and its folk heroes will become overshadowed by corporate power.
 
 

Long considered the sport of the Southeast, stock car racing has come a long way from its “outlaw roots” (Zengerle 41).  Today it’s a “national pastime” with races broadcasted everywhere from Chicago to Phoenix, and multi-billion-dollar television deals established with  NBC and FOX that began last season (Zengerle 41).  NASCAR’s booming national presence means big corporate bucks, as teams and drivers have become synonymous with major corporations like Target, Home Depot, America Online, and Viagra.  Such endorsements permeate NASCAR at every level, in some ways threatening to overshadow the sport itself. Sponsors like Excedrin, based in New Jersey and struggling to gain a market in the Southeast, often must negotiate with sales directors whose “idea of NASCAR was that it was just a bunch of rednecks racing around the track” (Zengerle 42).  Despite such common misconceptions, the sport’s changing demographics reveal NASCAR’s growing numbers of female fans, increasing average incomes among fans, and a growing presence beyond the Southeast.

The cost of sponsoring NASCAR race teams varies.  Sponsorships in the Winston Cup series begin at six million dollars a year.  “It’s not just about racing anymore…There are drivers out there who can’t drive a nail who have stayed in the sport for a decade because they are good spokespeople for corporations.  And then there are drivers out there who are great race car drivers, but they don’t have a ride because they have no ability to market anything,” said Andy Houston, a driver in NASCAR’s Busch series.  Family and individual racing teams are dropping out of the sport because the costs of competition far exceed the resources of all but the very wealthy and well-sponsored.  In addition, sponsors, sportswriters, and pit crew mechanics alike are coming to believe that its “rarely about the driver” and more and more about what a logo on a car can sell (Zengerle 43).  Retailers perceive the famed loyalty of NASCAR fans as the key to more sales; one survey found that "72 percent of NASCAR fans try to buy brands that sponsor the sport” (Zengerle 43).  In other words, consumers will avoid buying what they really need if it means supporting NASCAR and avoiding a product used by a favorite driver’s rival.

Many of the original NASCAR tracks also are being affected by the power of corporations.  For example, North Carolina's  North Wilkesboro Speedway, NASCAR's longest-running track, seemed doomed in the mid-1990s when "two terribly rich guys" showed little respect for the speedway's "deep traditions or maverick spirit" in an effort to move all of Wilkesboro's Winston Cup race dates to bigger tracks in bigger cities (Hinton 44).  NASCAR traditionalists maintain that small-town speedways should be preserved as "magic" place, like a "'Civil War battlefield...one of the places where you'll come back some day and tell your grandchildren what all happened'" (Hinton 47).  The relocation trend centers NASCAR far from the beaches and backroads where stock car racing began; in the early days of stock car racing, the heroes were local, small-town boys, and for years fans' idolization of drivers has seemed inextricably linked to nostalgia for a mythical, rural past.  Today, corporate interests, city jobs, and city living threaten to bury the folk hero, as well as the sport's connections to a southern, rural glory.
 
 

Television sponsorship that relies so heavily on large on-site audiences has led to many new developments in NASCAR.  Televised sports need spectators to create the crowd atmosphere in which the electronic spectator can participate vicariously.  Yet NASCAR ticket prices have risen to $60 or $80 for the Daytona 500 or Hooters 500 races, placing good seats beyond the reach of many traditional fans.  As fans weigh their desire to attend NASCAR events against their financial means essentially to support drivers' rising salaries, it can be hard to view changes like increased admission price, as progress.

The sport’s increasing “televisionication,” along with associated changes in drivers and management, "inevitably increases stress within traditional southern spectators who still haven’t adjusted to the other changes" surrounding NASCAR (Raitz 16).  It seems that the long sought goal of NASCAR's promoters, sponsors, and media executives to create a national, professional sport appears to be nearing reality, but, while changes are occurring for the better of the business, traditional fans are worried about losing the culture and community that existed at the roots of the sport.  NASCAR's big-business feel also affects the dynamics between fans and the drivers who seem to be less accessible than renowned "lingerers" like Richard Petty.  Drivers today appear to jet to another destination almost as soon as the race ends.  Whether or not such changing dynamics represent a corruption of the sport's fan culture, whether such changes should be feared, or not, they represent dualities in the formation of a nationalized sport; while the increasing diversification of NASCAR's fanbase can hardly be called negative, national culture may at the same time be perceived as invading one of the most hallowed traditions of the country's most regional of landscapes: the American South.