Photo essay Photojournalism

The magazine of the art-form of the photo-essay “A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!” Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker

Sept 2015 back issue

Nascar: about as Amercian as you can get

by George Bennett

Twenty years ago I embarked on a trip through the American southeast in order to shoot a photo essay on NASCAR: professional high performance stock car racing. At that time NASCAR racing was beginning to be not just a southern passion but America’s fastest growing spectator sport. Against all advice, I wanted to shoot the essay in B&W and attempt to illustrate the ‘back-stage’ aspects of the sport as well as the cars and the racing and the track scene. B&W, I thought, would also best illustrate what remained of the uniquely American aspects of NASCARS origins: moonshine running in the mountains and ‘hollers’ of Appalachia and thereabouts where outwitting and outrunning the law took guts and consummate driving skill- as well as engine building. There was still, even 20 years ago, an anti- establishment even ‘outlaw’ quality to stock car racing (as there was to its country music) that these days is hard to see what with all the corporate logos and big money in the sport. It’s been said that NASCAR is to Formula One racing what NFL football is to pro soccer. Let’s just say that unlike the engineering sophistication of Formula One or even Indy Car, NASA isn’t going to learn anything from NASCAR. But the appeal of the sport is basic and universal: speed and danger, guts and fear, aggression and competition- cars racing around a track at 200 mph, inches apart and often three abreast. Unlike open-wheel racing, in NASCAR, “racing is rubbing”and stock cars are built to survive crashes- but like in all high-speed motorsports, drivers sometimes get killed. A Sports Illustrated cover story and a book, Inside Track (Artisan, 1996) resulted from these B&W photos and I feel fortunate to have insinuated myself into shooting the sport before it became the marketing giant and brand-conscious business it is today. It is fitting somehow that, for no particular reason, I started shooting a lot of Jeff Gordon’s team that year in 1995 and it was to be his first year as Winston Cup champion. His crew chief at the time, Ray Evernham, used to just smile at me and my Nikon enigmatically whenever he saw me lurking around No. 24, never saying a word to me but abiding my presence. He later told me at the Champion’s award ceremony that he considered me a good- luck charm as Gordon won the first race I shot. Jeff Gordon has just this year announced that 2015 is to be his final year of racing.