Just Like Whiskey

Just Like Whisky

Oh Rapid Roy that stock car boy

He too much to believe

You know he always got an extra

pack of cigarettes Rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve

He got a tattoo on his arm that

say "Baby"

He got another one that just say

"Hey"

But every Sunday afternoon he

is a dirt track demon

In a '57 Chevrolet

Carl Smart works in a furniture factory and "Stick" Elliott sells junk, but if their callings are prosaic, the men are not. They are fast rollers in the grand Southern tradition of dirt track racing: small-town versions of Rapid Roy. Up to 3,500 fans will converge on the Concord Speedway 15 miles northeast of Charlotte, N.C., on a balmy Saturday evening to watch these two "pedal-to-the-metal" drivers bump fenders as they scream around the track in their blazing fast, gloriously battered stock cars. Stick and Carl are masters of the "power slide," a dirt racing technique that requires each driver to gauge the velocity of his car against its distance from other vehicles while skidding laterally around a slick clay oval at 100 m.p.h. -- up to four hurtling Chevys all fishtailing in unison. For excitement, the power slide is a grand slam homer and game-winning touchdown wrapped into one. It is this kind of action and these kind of men that draw perhaps 500,000 Southerners on a weekend to some 100 small tracks operating week after week for nine months a year. The sport defies economic logic. A late-model sports car race might feature a dozen cars worth from $12,000 to $16,000 each flying flat out to win a first prize of $700. At the smallest tracks, the purse can drop as low as $75.

Says Blaine S. Grant, the 45-year-old owner of Sure Deal Motors in Bessemer City: "Racing's like whisky. Someone will spin me out against a wall and I'll get disgusted and quit. By next Tuesday I'll be looking to fix the car so we can race again Saturday."

Racing is the down home sport of North Carolina. The tapeworm roads that swing through the Piedmont hills seem designed for it, and until this decade they were used for exactly that by moonshiners. Almost every male over 14 shyly admits to a little informal dark-of-night racing experience. California teen-agers get high on laughing gas; their peers in North Carolina prefer the 150 h.p. bursts of acceleration that a bottle of nitrous oxide delivers when attached to a sedan's air filter.

This thunder road legacy manifests itself after work on Friday when cars begin moving through the dusk toward Concord. Built in 1945, the half-mile dirt track has few amenities. Lighting is dim, spectators sit on concrete ledges. Yet Concord is a shrine. Junior Johnson, Tiny Lund and the illustrious Petty clan (Richard Petty, king of the stockers, won $378,865 last year) began their racing careers here. Spectators expect the local boy they applaud to become tomorrow's NASCAR hero. Says Cabarrus County Sheriffs Deputy Stowe Cobb: "We're all participants because those boys out there are our own people."

Too Civilized. Concord's races attract a diverse crowd that includes one-gallus retirees, peroxide mountain mamas and lonely textile workers from the nearby Cannon Mills. A crude spectator pecking order exists among fans. Families that applaud Chevrolets won't socialize with friends of the Dodge boys. Mechanic Howard Sussman buys a $4 ticket just to see the power slides. Says he: "My wife can't understand how I can fix cars all week and then spend the weekend watching them race."

North Carolina's addiction to dirt tracks is spreading. To avoid bankruptcy, the Myrtle Beach, S.C., raceway recently tore up its asphalt and went back to dirt; promoters up in Columbia are debating a similar move. After cutting the number of dirt tracks on its circuit to six, NASCAR now wants to add new ones.

The more dirt tracks the better because it is getting tougher practicing on public roads. "Things just went and got civilized on us," says Chuck Hefner, 25, who crisscrosses North Carolina servicing vending machines. "No matter how good you are, it's hard to outrun those two-way police radios."

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