BASS PRO SHOPS NRA NIGHT RACE, SATURDAY — 6:51:55 P.M., 40 MINUTES UNTIL LAP 1/500

The DJ keeps playing the wrong music.

The Bass Pro Shops NRA Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway is the one NASCAR event a year where drivers can choose the song that accompanies their pre-race introductions. “Lights Come On” by Jason Aldean booms across and through the bleachers, but it’s not right. “X Gon’ Give It To Ya” by DMX (which an official press release will later call “Gon Give It To Ya,” by X) is supposed to be playing as driver Matt DiBenedetto walks the red carpet. He's visibly annoyed.

The sound system in the infield where I’m standing is messed up, but someone fixes it just in time for the opening bars of Birdman and Lil Wayne’s “Stuntin’ Like My Daddy” to rush out of the stadium’s giant speakers.

Cash money still a company

And b[censored version] I’m the boss

And I be stuntin’ like my daddy, stuntin’ like my daddy...

I'm the young stunna, stuntin' like my daddy...

The crowd erupts as Dale Earnhardt Jr. bursts through the curtains with the stadium’s nickname splashed across them: THE LAST GREAT COLOSSEUM. Fans’ primal screams and shouts of “JUNIOR!” and “DALE!” drown out the music.

NASCAR’s favorite son says something muddled into the microphone, then raises it above his head, triumphant. He hasn’t been racing well this season, but fans don’t seem to mind. They’re just happy Dale Jr. is still here. For now, at least; he’s retiring at the end of this season.

The stands whoop and holler louder and louder as the 14-time most popular driver climbs into the bed of a Chevy truck, the chariot awaiting him at the end of the red carpet. He holds onto the cab like it’s reins of steel and glides down the straightaway to his Chevy, the high tech, aerodynamic race car he’ll soon drive around the track.

Kyle Busch, the best and most hated driver in the sport right now, walks out to boos a few drivers later. Fans flip him off, but he has his 2-year-old son Brexton with him, and the kid repeatedly pretends to fall as he holds his dad’s hand. The crowd softens at the sight of the goofy toddler and some cheering breaks through the jeers.

Busch bends down, and Brexton screams what sounds like “Fuck yeah!” into the mic. At a press conference later, Busch will say he told his son to yell, “Truck yeah.” Reporters in the media center will be skeptical.

The intros end. No other driver gets a response even close to what the fans give Dale Jr.

VOLUNTEER PARKWAY, BRISTOL, TENN. — 9:02:39, FRIDAY MORNING

It’s the morning before the Bristol Bass Pro Shops NRA Night Race, and I’m speeding.

I’m not not pretending I’m a race car driver, but I’m mostly worried I’ll be late for Chase Elliott’s 9:15 a.m. press conference. The Friday night race won’t start until 7 p.m., but the day begins early for reporters, who used to have to arrive at the track 12 hours ahead of time to beat the terrible traffic. Attendance has fallen so much that there’s hardly anyone on the road right now and won’t be until this afternoon, but no one’s thought to change the schedule.

Bristol straddles Virginia and Tennessee. During prohibition, bootleggers ran moonshine across the state line. They’d pack potent, highly flammable, homemade booze in the trunks of their Fords and Chevys and outrun state troopers, tearing around the sharp corners of country roads. They’d also race each other, which is eventually how NASCAR was born. Moonshine used to be the predominant illegal substance in the region, but these days it’s painkillers and fentanyl. Several of the talk stations I switch between as I approach the stadium are discussing the opioid crisis.

The deep green Tennessee hills are breathtaking. They rise straight up, walls of trees for miles. Taller mountains behind them fade into lighter greens and blues. Horse farms and dilapidated houses dot the countryside behind the auto body shops, car dealerships, Jiffy Lubes, and O’Reilly Auto Parts stores that line the road. The sky is bright and clear.

And then I round a corner, and there it is: Bristol Motor Speedway.

The stadium’s walls are as vertical as the hills, but they’re made of metal instead of earth, plastered with corporations’ neon signs rather than trees and underbrush. Logos of Food City, Bass Pro Shops, the NRA, and other sponsors, as well as the faces of famous drivers — Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt Sr. — adorn banners wrapped around the building’s many steel spines. One sign says, OUR ROOTS ARE IN RACING. Another says, THANK YOU DALE JR. RVs fill the hills behind the stadium and the Earhart Campground beside it.

The colossal structure is unnatural, arresting, incongruous with the landscape. It appears almost alien; beings besides humans might have put it here. I’m so distracted by the sight of the thing that I almost miss my turn. I pull a sharp left and channel my inner bootlegger, speeding up as I round a corner before pulling into the lot next to the stadium. The campgrounds sprawl up the hill beside it, and the RVs parked there make up a village, a temporary neighborhood on wheels. Confederate flags fly from at least four of the trailers’ roofs. They flap gently in the light breeze.

BASS PRO SHOPS NRA NIGHT RACE — 7:26:44 P.M., FIVE MINUTES UNTIL LAP 1/500

After the driver intros, I walk through the concrete tunnel that takes me underneath the steeply banked track to the main concourse. Black-and-white photos of Dale Sr. are plastered onto the cinder block walls. There’s also a picture of Dale Jr. posing with a broom in front of the Bristol trophy in 2004. It was the first time anyone had swept the weekend. Junior won the Busch series race (now called the Xfinity series) that Friday, then won the Nextel Cup series (now the Monster Energy Cup Series) on Saturday night.

“It’s Bristol, baby!” he yelled into the microphone when asked immediately after why the win was so special. Those words are now set in plastic in the form of a huge statue in the fan zone outside the stadium’s gates.

I make my way into the stands, which have mostly filled up along the straightaways but are still half-empty around the turns. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” is playing as I slide into an empty row of bleachers. Everyone’s standing as though it were the national anthem.

‘Cause I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free!

All of a sudden I hear a voice in my ear scream, “ARE YOU PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN?”

I whip around to find a guy wearing a DRUNK LIVES MATTER T-shirt bending down so that his face is level with mine, about three inches away. He’s holding a big black flag that has both the NASCAR and Monster Energy logos splashed across it. I recoil and don’t say anything.

He responds to my silence with, “You should be.” Then he drapes the flag around my shoulders and puts his hand on my back.

“Stop it; what are you doing?” I say, swatting the flag and his hand away and jumping back so quickly that I almost fall over onto three shirtless, middle-aged men in front of me. Flag Guy stares directly into my eyes. He shakes the NASCAR logo in my face.

“You just got baptized by the greatest thing this country has,” he says.

BRISTOL MOTOR SPEEDWAY — 11:45:58, FRIDAY MORNING

I’m standing on the asphalt of the infield, sweating in the thick Tennessee heat, watching a pit crew guy screw lug nuts onto a tire. He’s working on the No. 3 car, which is owned by Richard Childress Racing. Austin Dillon will drive it in tomorrow’s race. This strikes me as somewhat heretical. You wouldn’t give Babe Ruth’s No. 3 to another Yankee. How can anyone run No. 3 after Dale Sr.?

I made it in time for Chase Elliott’s press conference this morning, but I shouldn’t have bothered racing to get there. The 21-year-old son of NASCAR legend Bill Elliott (aka Awesome Bill from Dawsonville) just offered platitudes about trying hard — he’s been running well this season but he hasn’t won a race yet. The most interesting thing he said was that he wants to watch the upcoming solar eclipse from an airplane.

I passed Chase in the pits a few minutes ago and asked him if I could ask him a few questions. He told me I have to go through his PR guy or he’ll get in trouble. He's a smart kid who knows better than to offend anyone — an easy thing to do in the age of the internet — and put his sponsorships or public perception at risk. He keeps it vanilla.

“No, I mean, it’s frustrating every week. I don’t know how to quantify frustration. I don’t know how to measure it. None of it’s good. We want to be competitive, we want to compete, we want to have a good last season.” — Dale Earnhardt Jr.

The infield smells like gasoline and cigarettes. The entire place could go up in flames at any moment and I wouldn’t be surprised. Huge, 18-wheel haulers that bring the cars around the country during the 38-weekend season are parked in a perfectly straight line: a life-sized toy box. These trucks are basically RVs with hydraulic lifts that put race cars in compartments above the living area when drivers aren’t racing them or practicing, which a few are currently doing. They zoom around the track between tune-ups.

The pit crew guy finishes adjusting the screws on the tire. He tells me that the drills he used 15 years ago were the same ones I could buy at an auto parts store. So were the cars’ brakes and exhaust pipes. But now, racing teams make everything in-house, test cars in wind tunnels, and calibrate them within an inch of their steel lives. All of this means that it now costs $40 million to run one car for one season. In 1994, brakes cost $3,500 at the Daytona 500. Now they cost $38,000. NASCAR knows the high costs are unsustainable, and everyone — from drivers to team owners — wants to bring them down. But that’s easier said than done; once it gets going, technological progress is hard to stop.

I walk up to the No. 3 car. This thing used to be the common thread between mere mortals and racing gods, but automotive sales are plummeting as more Americans stay in cities. Not that a sedan you’d drive off a lot has much in common with the one I’m staring at now, anyways.

This machine resembles something a UFO would pilot more than it looks like the Camry I’ve rented. I stoop down to peer into the metal exoskeleton. The most substantial thing inside, besides the 900 horsepower engine under the hood, is the HANS device, a safety measure that looks like a neck brace with extra padding. Dale Sr. refused to wear his and died after colliding head-on with a retaining wall during the last lap of the Daytona 500 in 2001. That October, NASCAR made head restraints mandatory.

Ads for DOW Chemical splash the car’s black sides. R.J. Reynolds, a tobacco company, was the first Cup sponsor in 1971. The company managed to hang on through the decades as Big Tobacco was dying but gave up the sponsorship in 2003. Nextel picked up the rights, then merged with Sprint, renaming the races once again in 2008. Sprint abruptly dropped the sport late last year. NASCAR had to scramble. Eventually Monster Energy stepped in.

After Chase’s press conference, I asked Tad Geschickter, who co-owns the team JTG/Daugherty Racing with his wife Jodi, what he loves about NASCAR. I expected him to say something about the roar of the engines or the thrill of speed.

But he said this:

“For me, there’s no other sport that can provide the value for corporate America that this can. NASCAR fans say, ‘My team can’t run without this sponsor, so I’m going to buy their product because I love the sport.’ That turns into huge business results. And that’s what keeps corporate America coming back.”

A sport that started because guys had to rebel against The Man in order to get drunk has become a vehicle — a very, very expensive vehicle — to make The Man even richer.

I leave the infield, descend into the tunnel, pop up into the concourse, and walk out onto the bleachers. I climb up to the very top row, marveling at this massive crater in the middle of the Tennessee country.

No one else is up here except for one old guy with white hair and leathery, tan skin. He’s wearing a Dale Jr. tank and drinking a beer wrapped in an ancient koozie with Dale Sr.’s No. 3 on it. A cooler beneath him is packed with ice and 10 more beers:

The cars practicing are so loud that he has to lean in very close to hear me when I ask him his name. He reeks of booze and says his name five times before I give up and take out my phone, asking him to type it for me. His fingers are too shaky for the touch screen of my iPhone, so he takes out his flip phone and slowly types out D-A-L-E.

“Just like Dale Sr.” he mouths. “And Junior.”

I yell into his ear, asking if he’ll miss Dale Jr. when he retires. He nods.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he mouths.

Dale isn’t the only one who feels lost when he thinks about a future without Dale Jr., and NASCAR knows it. Right now, the hope is that those fans will transfer their allegiance to another driver, perhaps one like Chase Elliott, who also comes from racing royalty.

The problem is there aren’t many compelling reasons to do so.

BASS PRO SHOPS NRA NIGHT RACE — 7:31:01 P.M., SATURDAY, LAP 1/500

“Drivers, start your engines!”

The sound of 40 cars starting up at once rumbles from the pits. It echoes outside the walls and across the hills, a deafening heartbeat inside the stadium’s metallic rib cage. I understand now why one of this place’s nicknames is “Thunder Valley” — the sound climbs to 140 decibels, the same as an aircraft carrier in full swing. Fans put in earplugs or don noise-blocking headphones. They adjust their radio scanners to track their favorite drivers. No one talks to each other because they can’t. It’s the opposite of a silent rave.

The drivers circle around the track, shaking their wheels from side to side to create friction and warm up the tires faster, which helps them stick better to the smooth concrete. The cars are more animals than machines. They’ve subsumed the drivers inside and become sentient.

The green flag drops and they’re off.

It’s a beautiful, hypnotizing dance set to the sounds of a chainsaw slicing through aluminum. Awesome in the literal sense. The vibrations buzz through the bleachers and into my feet, my legs; up into my spine. When you watch a race on television, you can’t feel the rumbles. You can’t hear the fullness of the roars. You can’t smell this noxious mix of cigarette smoke, burning rubber, spilled beer, and gasoline fumes.

But now, witnessing a race in person for the first time, I get it. I can’t look away.

On the 88th lap, fans stand up and cheer to honor Dale Jr. as he whizzes by. Two guys a few rows down stay standing, each raising three fingers to the sky, an homage to the original, and only true, No. 3.

Dale Sr. isn't dead. He's more alive than most people who walk the earth.

And although it was an almost impossible order, the son has managed to win over the crowd that still worships the father. Dale Jr. has become nearly as beloved as the sport’s most beloved driver of all time. He’s filled his dad’s shoes better than anyone could have imagined.

What remains to be seen is whether there’s any driver in the sport today who can even come close to filling his.

BRISTOL MOTOR SPEEDWAY — 3:11:15, FRIDAY AFTERNOON

Matt DiBenedetto is sitting in the media center Friday afternoon before qualifying rounds, which will determine the order drivers start in tomorrow night. He had a bad first practice, but he’s feeling better after the laps he just ran.

Cars and money matter more than talent now. You can be the most gifted driver in the world, and it doesn't matter if you don’t have the cash. This bothers 26-year-old DiBenedetto to no end. Not only does he have the technical ability to succeed in this sport, he also has the personality. He’s beloved by his fan base for his funny tweets, a hashtag dedicated to his love of burritos (#DiBuritto), and his honesty on Reddit and Snapchat. His following isn’t huge: He has about 50k followers on Twitter, peanuts compared to Chase Elliott’s 700,000, or Danica Patrick’s millions. Still, his fans are so engaged that he almost got voted into the All-Star race.

“But yeah, I could send one tweet and ruin my entire career,” he jokes, tapping his phone, which sits on the table in front of us. I tell him I could too, and we both laugh, fall silent, then shudder before continuing our conversation.

In a sport where viewers’ loyalty centers on individual drivers, a guy like DiBenedetto, or Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr. (who wasn’t racing at Bristol because he currently doesn’t have a sponsor), or Ryan Blaney, or Landon Cassill, could be instrumental to bringing in new, younger fans — if they could win. Most of the other personalities just aren’t that interesting. Kyle Busch puts on a show, but fans hate him. This works when you’ve got Dale Jr. to play the hero to Busch’s villain. But what’s a heel without a face?

Times have changed drastically since the days when guys lit Winstons and threw punches at each other in the pits after a race. It wasn’t just the drivers, either. If you believe the stories, one time Lee Petty’s wife, Elizabeth, mom to Richard, got in on a fight and walloped the driver Tiny Lund (who weighed 270 pounds, easily) in the back of the head with her pocketbook. Legend has it she was packing a .45.

Now, drivers look more like Goldman Sachs interns than the mechanic who’d fix your car if you pulled into one of the auto body shops off the main drag in Bristol.

DiBenedetto, however, looks like a normal dude from Grass Valley, Calif. because he is one. He got bit by the speed bug as a kid (he doesn’t know why; neither of his parents were into racing) and grew up pushing go-karts around dirt tracks. His parents moved the family to South Carolina to pursue his racing career but stopped paying for his cars when he was 16 because they couldn’t afford it. He’s hung on to the sport by a thread in the 10 years since, hopping from team to team, getting in cars thanks to his sheer talent and a lot of luck.

Dale Sr. didn’t come from money, either. But he could use spec parts to throw a car together and muscle his way to wins. You can’t do that anymore. DiBenedetto knows he needs more sponsors, but he can’t get them because he isn’t winning. And he isn’t winning because he doesn’t have the best car. And he can’t get in the best car because he doesn't have sponsors, because he isn't winning.

It’s a Catch-22.

“So that’s where the hard part is,” DiBenedetto tells me. “If you have the same skill set in baseball, being that determined and that exceptionally good at what you do, you can legit make it. Racing is not that way. If I had a $30 million sponsor behind me, I could drive a race car well. I know I could be on a top team.”

Racing is made up of dynasties. Bill France Sr., who founded the sport in 1948, passed the business down to his son Bill Jr. who passed it down to his son, Brian, the current CEO. Then you’ve got the drivers: Earnhardts, Allisons, Waltrips, Elliotts. NASCAR seems to think a last name can make up for a lack of charm. They’re going with what they know and with what’s worked before. You can almost imagine the marketing meeting: Dale Sr. and Dale Jr. worked out, and people loved Bill Elliott, so let’s push his son, Chase.

But you can’t teach charisma. NASCAR got lucky once: One of the biggest stars to ever drive a car had a son with a great personality who was gifted at connecting with fans. And even then, it took Dale Jr. a while to be loved for who he is rather than who his father was.

DiBenedetto wasn’t born with a silver wheel in his hands or a last name that’s etched into the walls at Bristol, but he can entertain on and off the track. Perhaps NASCAR will wise up and realize this could actually be key to his — and the sport’s — future success.

Later this afternoon, DiBenedetto will totally botch his qualifying rounds and will have to start the race tomorrow 34th out of 40 cars. This will suck, and he’ll be pissed about it. He’ll release an honest video on Twitter telling his fans he’s sorry and that he’s as upset as they are. He’ll delete it a few days later.

Tomorrow morning, sitting in front of his hauler, DiBenedetto will tell me that his lousy starting position could actually be a good thing. If the front of the pack wrecks out — which they often do at short tracks like Bristol — he’ll be able to scoot by them and have a real shot. But the CEO of the construction company that sponsors DiBenedetto will be sitting nearby as the driver says this to me, and it will seem very much like DiBenedetto is trying to will the chance of a win into existence.

There won’t be one.

BASS PRO SHOPS NRA NIGHT RACE, SATURDAY — 9:25:32 P.M., LAP 272/500

The sun goes down and the fluorescent lights come on, glinting off the hoods of the race cars, adding an artificial glow to the cars’ dizzying circles.

After a brief stint in the top 10, things aren’t looking good for Dale Jr. He’s fallen back to 21st as we enter the third and final stage of the race. Busch, Kyle Larson, Elliott, and Erik Jones (all of whom are in their 20s, except Busch, who’s 32) battle for the top spots, but by lap 361, Busch is in first again. DiBenedetto managed to crawl his way up a few spots, but he’s stuck firmly in 29th.

There are very few wrecks.

“This race is terrible!” a reporter says, too loudly, in the press box.

One of my southern colleague’s father used to say that “Racing at Bristol is a damn fistfight in a soup bowl.” But it isn’t anymore. The speedway used to be a one-groove track, which meant cars had to physically touch each other — called a bump-and-run — if one was going to break out of the single-file line. In 2007, owner Bruton Smith resurfaced and modified the track to create more space and allow drivers to race side by side with plenty of room to pass.

Fans hated it.

They wanted the old, rough-and-tumble, wreck-heavy style of racing back. After only half of the stadium’s 160,000 seats sold in 2012, Smith tried to narrow the track again by grinding down the upper groove, but drivers complained that all it did was make things slippery. (“It’s terrible,” Busch declared.) This race is more tetherball game than fistfight.

Busch pulls away. Dale is 22nd and falling. DiBenedetto is back in 30th. There’s a flurry of excitement over the radio as it looks like there’s a prayer Jones can catch Busch. For a few moments, as they battle it out, the race is thrilling. I get a taste of what the sport used to be, and I’m struck by a sense of loss. I miss something I never knew.

Fans who did know the sport in its wild, lawless form miss it even more. But that doesn’t mean they’ve stuck around.

EARHART CAMPGROUND — 2:45:01, SATURDAY AFTERNOON

Cindy Lee sells unofficial NASCAR merchandise from a tent in the Earhart Campground outside the stadium’s gates. Most of the gear for sale is dedicated to the Dales, but there are also glow-in-the-dark Bristol shirts, photos of Danica Patrick in a bikini, and beer koozies. There are also shirts that say “If you can read this, the bitch fell off,” above a caricature of Donald Trump pushing a sexualized Hillary Clinton off a motorcycle.

Lee stopped watching the races after Dale Sr. died and NASCAR changed everything about the sport in the years since. It’s almost entirely different now; there are three stages to a race rather than one long slog, the system of awarding points isn’t the same as it used to be, and there are now playoffs in addition to the regular Cup Series championship (as well as other, more in-the-weeds alterations).

It would be like taking the NFL, making each touchdown worth nine points, resetting the score at halftime, and tacking on a five-game postseason after the Super Bowl.

“You never could get a ticket unless you knew someone who had season tickets who was selling one. Now you can get ‘em off street corners. Food City has ‘em for sale.” — Cindy Lee, t-shirt vendor

NASCAR also got cocky. In its heyday in the 1990s and through 2005 or so, top brass thought their sport was invincible. They tried to appeal to a broader national audience, forgetting that they were built on the backs of die-hard fans who bought season tickets to regional tracks. Executives messed with races, adding new ones in Las Vegas and moving old staples off the schedule (the beloved North Wilkesboro Speedway lost both its dates) and added races in *gasp* Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas, and Southern California, leading many fans to believe that NASCAR was abandoning its Southeast roots.

They even tried to build a track outside New York City, on Staten Island. But that and many of the sport’s other plans flamed out after the recession, when the states that many fans come from — Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and California — were hit the hardest by the economic crash.

The sport also adopted more safety measures and reconfigured some tracks to make them less dangerous.

Lee isn’t jazzed about any of this.

“With all the equipment they’ve got ‘em wearing now, it’s not like racing anymore; it’s about money. It’s sports, it’s not racing,” Lee says, standing by a display of toy cars. “If they hit each other, it used to be, well, fine. It was racing. That’s the way it was. Now they wanna penalize ‘em. They don’t let ‘em go out and race and have fun.”

She pauses, looking around the campground.

“Bristol used to be sold out, and it hasn’t been in years,” she continues. “You never could get a ticket unless you knew someone who had season tickets who was selling one. Now you can get ‘em off street corners. Food City has ‘em for sale. I went last night to walk around the campground. There’s only one-third of the vendors here from three years ago.”

Lee is right. Races at Bristol, which once sold out 55 consecutive races, always have empty seats now. Between the ticket prices, transportation, and lodging, it can cost families thousands of dollars to go to a race. The sport is struggling a bit on TV, too: Ratings for seven of the eight races Fox broadcast in the first half of the season were down from 2015. The sport is OK financially until 2024 because it’s locked into billion-dollar broadcast deals with Fox and NBC Sports, but after that...well, who knows.

A man who doesn’t want me to use his name in this article is browsing the racks of Cindy’s booth with his grandson named Diesel. The guy — I’ll call him Jim — works at a paper mill in the south that used to be employee-owned until a global corporation bought it out last year. He’s here for the first time in five years because Diesel wants to see a race. All of Jim’s friends who used to have season tickets gave theirs up when cars ceased to look anything like the ones they drove and the drivers they loved retired or died.

But there’s another reason Jim stopped coming.

“I’m mad at Earnhardt and Johnson for calling for taking down the Confederate flag,” he says. “I don’t like it. It’s the same as these people calling for tearing down these monuments. It’s just part of history. And it’s mostly white people who want to tear these down. I don’t get it.”

He's referring to Dale Jr. and Jimmie Johnson, who supported removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015.

Dale Jr. also spoke out against Trump’s immigration ban back in January. He most recently tweeted “Hatred, bigotry, & racism should have no place in this great country. Spread love,” after the white supremacist and Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. where a white supremacist killed a woman, Heather Heyer, with his car when he deliberately plowed into the crowd.

“It’s sad and frustrating to see what happened,” Dale Jr said at his Thursday press conference. “And you feel sort of somewhat responsible to speak on it.”

Dale Jr.’s statements didn’t come across that brave to me when I first heard them. They seemed more like human decency than anything bold or divisive. But as I stand here talking to Jim among the multiple RVs flying Confederate flags, it's somewhat impressive Dale Jr. said anything at all.

“Look,” Jim says. “I got black friends. But we gotta separate race — just like church and state — from what we love. We gotta keep race out of racing.”

Before I can ask him exactly what he means by “keep race out of racing,” he tells me he and Diesel have to go find something to eat, and he walks away.

Diesel follows, unwrapping the toy car Jim bought him, a replica of Kyle Busch’s Toyota. Busch is Diesel’s favorite driver, even though Jim only likes drivers who race Fords. The majority of fans will hate it if Busch wins tonight, and it honestly doesn’t seem like any outcome would make Jim happy. But maybe, if Diesel gets to see Busch take home the trophy, the trip will have been worth it.

BASS PRO SHOPS NRA NIGHT RACE — 10:44:98, LAP 500/500

The checkered flag falls. Busch wins, sweeping the weekend for the second time in his career.

Dale Jr. comes in 23rd.

He pulls into the pits, where none of the drivers are fighting each other, and climbs out of the car. He’s pale after sweating out 10-15 pounds of liquid over the course of three-and-a-half hours. Shaking his head and putting his hands on his hips, he stares at the Chevy that let him down. His crew chief pops the hood, and they both look at the engine.

“This race track can be a lot of fun, or it can be very difficult,” Dale Jr. says to me and two other reporters. “I used to drive — gosh...”

He trails off, rubs his temples.

“I just don’t know what to do,” he finally continues, exasperated. “We were quick for 20 laps. We passed five cars. Then we just dropped like a rock.”

One reporter tells Dale Jr. it’s the most frustrated he’s seen him all season.

“No, I mean, it’s frustrating every week,” Dale Jr. says. “I don’t know how to quantify frustration. I don’t know how to measure it. None of it’s good. We want to be competitive, we want to compete, we want to have a good last season. I don’t want to be out there just packing it in. It’s a lot of work to run 23rd, I’ll say that.”

Busch drives his Toyota up Victory Lane and climbs out onto the roof. Someone hands him a broom and he sweeps the top of his car, mimicking — intentionally or not — the picture of Dale Jr. that hangs in the walls of the tunnel. The crowd boos and flips him off. He plugs his ears and stares them down, taunting them from the jumbotron as confetti falls.

Dale Jr. looks up at the huge screens. He grimaces as he watches Busch celebrate, as though someone's about to reset a bone he's broken. Squinting his eyes and pursing his lips, he shakes his head and walks away alone, disappearing into the maze of haulers.

12:46:23, BRISTOL MOTOR SPEEDWAY, SUNDAY MORNING

The pit crews have packed up the cars and the haulers are starting to leave. Race trash — beer cans, cigarette butts, water bottles, energy drinks, stray ear plugs, bits of confetti — litters the pits and the stands.

The stadium smells like a campfire, and the Bass Pro Shops NRA Night Race logo (a fish with bat wings, which looks suspiciously like the butt of a rifle) flips around and around on the jumbotron. The track has cooled off, and my shoes no longer stick to the concrete as I walk up to the concourse. I can’t figure out what feels so strange, but then I realize Thunder Valley is quiet for the first time all weekend.

The storm is over. Bristol sits empty, straddling state lines and decades, the past and the present. The future is anyone’s guess.

The drivers left long ago, but fans still wait outside while the trucks roll out. They cheer as each one exits the gates. The haulers honk in acknowledgement, each blast loud and guttural; leftover noise. I get into my rental car. Right before I close the door, I hear much louder screams and cheers float up from the stadium’s entrance.

Dale Jr.’s truck, with the Nationwide logo and No. 88 splashed across the sides, emerges. It makes its way down the drive, honking the whole time. The remaining fans don’t stop cheering until it’s out of sight.