The Girl's Guide to NASCAR
By Liz Allison, Center Street, 2006

      I’m not, I must admit, a girl, but my understanding of NASCAR is probably roughly equivalent to what the publishers of The Girl’s Guide to NASCAR consider to be a girl’s knowledge of the sport. More importantly, I can see the value in getting to know stock car racing, given the political clout that the NASCAR-lovin’ demographic has gained in our country as of late. So I figured The Girl’s Guide was as good a place for me to start as any.

      I ran into a problem on the title page, where it says “For Ladies Only—No Men Allowed!” NASCAR driver Darrell Waltrip ran into the same problem when he was asked to write the book’s foreword. Waltrip could have gone the same route that Merle Haggard did when he was faced with writing the foreword to Bob Eubanks’ autobiography: he simply could have not read the book and said that he was sure it was good, even without having cracked the cover. But, no, Waltrip dared venture into forbidden territory and report that The Girl’s Guide is a good book. So I decided to read it, too, despite my gender.

      The book is written by Liz Allison, wife of the late Davey Allison. Even I remember that Davey Allison was killed in 1993 in a helicopter crash at a racetrack. I didn’t know, however, that Liz Allison had gone on to a career as a broadcaster and NASCAR journalist, one of the few females to cover the sport. If anyone is qualified to write the female perspective on NASCAR, it should be Liz.

      The thing is, for the first 11 chapters of the book, there’s not much that feels particularly female about the text. The book’s first half is devoted to an explanation of what makes NASCAR tick: history; the rules of races; the structure of the Nextel Cup series and the various other NASCAR offshoot series; race strategy; the drivers’ race day routines; etc. These chapters are a gender-neutral introduction to the sport that doesn’t seem particularly geared toward women (except that it’s not a terribly technically challenging introduction, which we’ll address later). I suppose I could have learned a lot about NASCAR from these first chapters, but I basically learned that there’s not a lot to learn: a bunch of cars drive in circles really fast; the one in front at the end of the race wins; and the guy who wins the most races gets a trophy at the end of the year. That, apparently, is NASCAR.

      You might be asking yourself, so, where’s the “girl” stuff? That comes, ostensibly, in the second half of the book, when we get into the domestic side of NASCAR. That is, planning a trip with the kids to a NASCAR race, where to find shopping near the track, how to throw a great NASCAR party and that kind of thing. Throughout the book, little sidebars labeled “Girlfriend to Girlfriend” hint at the inclusion of tidbits of feminine interest, but frankly, they’re all just miscellaneous trivia that has nothing to do with girls or girlhood. Not until one of the sidebars gave advice about finding feminine products at the track were any of the tips less than equally useful to boys.

      The last section of the book is devoted to lists of drivers, technical data on race tracks and a glossary—all of which are arguably gender-neutral content.

      Did I learn anything about NASCAR that has helped me understand the fans? Well, I discovered that the drivers have the stature of rock stars among those who love the races, which explains why people put stickers with drivers’ numbers in the back window of their pickup trucks and feel passionately about it. I also learned that “72 percent of NASCAR fans consciously select the products of NASCAR sponsors,” which explains both why NASCAR drivers are such self-conscious hawkers of their sponsors’wares and why the sport has become such a giant corporate and commercial enterprise.

      But all facetiousness aside, the real revelation (albeit a minor one) is the sexism inherent in the very existence of a “girl’s” guide to the sport. There’s very little in the book that couldn’t be targeted at a NASCAR novice, male or female, and that which is directed specifically at women—recipes and fashion tips, for instance—is just about as unenlightened as you can get. One gets the impression that the book is aimed at the wives of NASCAR fans who are desperate to understand a sport that doesn’t interest them very much but which takes up so much of their men’s time and brainpower. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that the NASCAR world is sexist, but I am a bit shocked that its sexism could be stated so clearly and unashamedly.

Copyright 2006 Ad Media Inc.