Wide Open : Days and Nights on the NASCAR Tour

It's a wild carnival that travels across the country, selling speed as the salvation for all that ails. It's a world of split-second life-or-death decisions, where huge egos clash on the track, and where old country ways are disappearing into a mega-money hustle of big-city sports. It's the fastest growing sport in America, spawning idols like Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt. It is NASCAR Winston Cup Tour. . . .

Now ESPN Magazine writer Shaun Assael takes us behind the scenes, into the pits and onto the tracks, chronicling the days and nights of Americas fastest soap opera. Secrets don't keep long, he writes, but they don't have to. Everything changes fast in the speed world.

Wide Open looks at one full year on the NASCAR circuit as it has never been examined before. This extraordinary book examines the life, the loves, the blood feuds of the stars, the grunts, the drivers, the mechanics, the wives, the girlfriends, the moneymen--everyone and anyone who makes things happen.

Assael chronicles the travels of three particular racers--Bobby Hamilton, Dave Marcis, and Brett Bodine--as they struggle through a thirty-one-race season. He takes us on the political campaign trail with Richard Petty, into Flossie Johnson's kitchen where she tells what it was like to live with and be left by the legendary Junior Johnson, and into the fascinating and heartbreaking realm of Bobby Allison's broken dreams.

Wide Open is a funny, tragic, dramatic journey inside a world that has long been closed.

The author of Wide Open: Days and Nights on the NASCAR Tour takes his title from the acronym WFO, racing shorthand for a less clean version of "wide open"; to go WFO is to bring the hammer down. When conditions are right and the car feels good, a driver has a chance to go WFO--that is, if he has the skill and the guts. Going WFO in a 700-horsepower racecar, confined by a limited space and surrounded by 40 similar vehicles, is a relative concept, having more to do with the vehicle's performance and the driver's threshold for fear than anything else. This is the driving force behind stock car racing; it's a ludicrously dangerous sport that embodies everything Americans cherish: high risk, big money, and palpable thrills. Shaun Assael chronicles a year in the life of the people involved in the ever-moving caravan of Winston Cup racing. Following the fortunes of three drivers on the 1996 tour, he provides an up-close look at the tremendous mental, physical, and financial pressures that mount for the competitors of the world's biggest and fast-growing spectator sport. Wide Open is a fast-paced ride behind the scenes of the NASCAR tour.