The use of stock cars has enabled NASCAR fans not just to empathize with particular drivers—and root for their success—but also to identify with and own the very products that carried them to victory. “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” went the sales mantra first introduced in the 1950s. The marketing strategy was so successful that it soon lured other advertisers into the mix. If a car can sell Detroit’s brands, the logic went, why not make the vehicles platforms for other products?
This, in no small part, is what makes the sport a multibillion-dollar business. NASCAR devotees are known among sponsors to be ardent brand-loyalists—more so than the fans of any other sport. Little wonder, then, that NASCAR itself has become a brand: practically any wearable item, from hats, shoes, and T-shirts to boxer shorts and bikinis, can be purchased bearing NASCAR car numbers, driver mug shots, and sponsor logos. Also available are branded clocks, jewelry, bedding, tableware, refrigerators, wallpaper, and upholstered leather sofas. The merchandise garners sales of an estimated $2 billion a year.
REBEL HEARTS
With 145 laps completed and 43 to go, the #17 car shuddered and began to skid out. A collective groan went through the stands. The engine had blown out, not an uncommon occurrence in racing given the strains put on car engines. I didn’t have long to wonder whether this was the “big one.” As #17 began to fishtail, it clipped the nose of another car riding its fender and set off a domino effect. At 200 miles an hour, even the slightest disturbance can force air under a vehicle’s chassis, popping the car up like a Frisbee and flipping it on its back. The result was an eleven-car pileup that brought the race to a stop and the entire audience to its feet.
Looking up, I was struck by the appearance of the crowd. For all the wealth of competing logos and gear available to them, by far the standout choice among the Talladega fans was patriotic garb: the grandstands looked like a pointillist painting in red, white, and blue. I approached one bystander, a sixty-three-year-old account manager at a North Carolina carpet company who had been coming to NASCAR races since they were held on dirt tracks in the 1950s, and asked him about this apparent connection between stock car racing and patriotism. “Those fellas are fast, proud, fearless go-getters with rebel hearts,” he said, nodding toward the track. “That about sums up the American spirit, don’t it?”
I’d take it a bit further to say that no consumer product more wholly embodies the American ethos than the automobile—“the heartbeat of America,” as Chevrolet famously dubbed it. The word derives from the Greek root auto, “self,” and the Latin mobile, “moving”—words that could be said to define the American dream: we each propel ourselves toward the life and destiny of our own choosing. In these individual pursuits, we also consume on average 1.5 gallons of gasoline per person per day. This fuel consumption—roughly quadruple that of the average European—is due in part to the great distances traveled in our largely suburban, auto-dependent lifestyles, but also to the fact that we have some of the lowest fuel economy standards of any industrial nation—lower even than those of our up-and-coming rival China. All of which contributes to a habit of domestic consumption that far exceeds our ability to produce domestic oil.
There were moments when I felt like the whole NASCAR enterprise should be illegal—just as racing was prohibited during World War II in order to save fuel for the troops, and just as gas was rationed during the Arab oil embargo. Why shouldn’t Americans be asked to give up activities such as NASCAR as we grapple with war, dwindling supplies, and a growing environmental crisis?
But while I half expected to feel some indignation, I didn’t expect to enjoy the whole experience so much. The body-rumbling speed, the roar of the crowd, the open-throttle sense of freedom, the cars shifting and moving in a V-shaped flock formation like mechanical birds in flight—the race had a thrill factor and a beauty that seemed, if only for moments, to justify all the fuel required to bring it to life. I came to understand that these questions were more gnarled and complicated than I’d thought. That NASCAR was more universally American—more me—than I’d ever realized.
What I couldn’t get my mind around was how, exactly, it had come to this. I wanted to know the story behind America’s long-running love affair with cars. How did we develop a fetish for cars so consuming that we’d spend money and time watching them drive around in circles? How did Detroit automakers, and American consumers, become so reckless about our fuel consumption? How did so much of our lifestyles, our very identities—our neighborhoods, shopping centers, transportation networks—come to revolve around the combustion engine?
AMERICA’S TOP MODEL
Henry Ford, the father of the American automobile industry, was born just outside of Dearborn, Michigan, in 1863. The descendent of Belgian and Irish immigrants, Ford attended a one-room schoolhouse and worked on his family’s farm until the age of sixteen when he left for Detroit. By day he worked in a machine shop and by night he repaired clocks and watches. Eventually he landed a job as chief engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company. He dabbled in inventions in his spare time—building a horseless carriage and a steam engine tractor—until in 1884 he read a magazine article about the four-stroke internal combustion engine newly invented by German engineer Nicholas Otto. Ford spent the better part of a decade tinkering in a small brick shed in his garden, eventually constructing the “Quadricycle,” a two-cylinder motor affixed to bicycle wheels with no body or means of reversing.
By August 1899, Ford had raised enough money to leave his job at Edison Illuminating with the hope of building “a car for the great multitude.” Whereas the cars of Europe were affordable only to the elite, Ford’s founding vision for the motor company he chartered in 1903 was to give America—its rich and poor alike—the gift of motion. One of the most comprehensive books on American car history is James J. Flink’s The Automobile Age, which documents the meteoric rise of Ford’s empire. In 1908, Ford released his Model T at a cost of $850 ($19,300 in today’s dollars), the first motorcar affordable to the middle class, and one that could be replicated quickly enough to meet large-scale demand. The Model T sold hundreds of units in the first year, but Ford kept pushing his innovation—refining his assembly process and dropping his price.
By 1912, the Model T was selling for $575 ($12,200 today) and the assembly of the chassis took one-sixth the amount of time it had taken just a year earlier. By 1916, the car was priced at $345, and produced at a record-high annual rate of 738,811 units—roughly half the total number of cars then on U.S. roads. And by 1926, “assembling an automobile took only ninety minutes,” wrote Flink, “and cars rolled off [the] four final assembly lines every thirty seconds.” Ford sold more than 15 million cars between 1908 and 1927, at which point the price had been reduced to a record low of $290 ($3,400 today)—a car even bootleggers could afford.
In fact, as mentioned earlier, the roots of stock car racing were formed during the Prohibition era when bootleggers ferried illegal booze throughout the South. Ford became a folk hero to these renegades—no small irony given that he was a puritanical, compulsively disciplined man so opposed to drinking that he made all his employees swear off alcohol consumption. (Ford declined even a taste from the jar of home-made moonshine one fan offered him during a trip to Asheville, North Carolina.)
For all his success, Ford lived in a relatively modest home. His fireplace bore the inscription “Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.” He openly questioned the limits of his wealth: “Money means nothing to me,” he said in a 1923 interview. “There is nothing I want that I cannot have. But I do not want the things money can buy.” He wanted, among other things, political power—at one point he contemplated a bid for president—but his reputation as a teetotaler, a corporate autocrat, a religious eccentric (he reportedly believed in reincarnation), and a bigot (he ran anti-Semitic comments in a newspaper he owned) limited his voter appeal.
In truth, Henry Ford probably had more influence on America from outside of Washington than he ever could have had from inside the capital. By far his biggest cultural and economic impact came in the form of