| | CONCORD, N.C. -- Lowe's Motor Speedway turned on the lights to Winston Cup qualifying Wednesday night in front of tens of thousands of flash-bulb popping fans.
Jeff Gordon drove his colorful Chevrolet to the pole as the glare of the lights radiated off his No. 24 Monte Carlo.
|  | | Jeff Gordon celebrates winning the pole Wednesday night with teammate Jerry Nadeau. |
Now, they won't race under the lights this weekend. So, why qualifying under them four days before the race? Well, qualifying at night helps the working man find his way into the grandstands after the 9-to-5 bustle has come to a close and Charlotte has settled down for the night.
Still, a superspeedway with lights? The way they used to do it on the bullrings that cluttered the south and taught many of today's top stars how to beat-and-bang and win races? Who would've thunk it?
The thinking man is H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler, the general manager turned president of Lowe's Motor Speedway at Charlotte, who lit up this speedway several years ago and found out that racing at night -- like most of his ideas -- wasn't bad.
There are a lot of things that other tracks don't necessarily do like they do it at Lowe's Motor Speedway, and Wheeler wouldn't want it any other way.
From his desk, which sits next to a window in the Bruton O. Smith Tower, Wheeler can see his dreams -- part the creation of a kid at heart and part the creation of an imaginative genius whose ingenuity and marketing skills have helped turn Lowe's Motor Speedway into a Circus on Asphalt.
Wheeler presides over this facility both as the head-honcho, and twice each year as the Master of Ceremonies when the Winston Cup tour visits the track that most out-of-towners now call their home turf.
To be competitive in today's world of stock car racing, drivers come from all over the country to the Southern Piedmont of North Carolina where Wheeler's influence attracted over $275 million of income to the region last year alone. That's more than any other professional sport in North Carolina.
"You win a race at Charlotte, and you've had a great year," says Sterling Marlin. "It's just one of those tracks that is just really, really important to a lot of people and one of those tracks that has a lot of attention paid to it.
"Charlotte has always meant a lot to me. It's one of those tracks I kind of grew up on. We only came over a couple times a year from Nashville, but we spent a lot of the year getting ready for races there. If you did pretty well at Daytona or Charlotte or Darlington, and later on Talladega, then you had really done pretty well.
"In a lot of ways the place hasn't changed a lot in the way people approach it. Everybody always brought out their best stuff for the Charlotte races. If a guy won at Charlotte, you knew he had beaten everybody else's best stuff with his best stuff. You know, a lot of those old short tracks, you'd usually take something that was already dented and beaten up some, or something you didn't care as much about tearing up, because you knew it was going to be smashed pretty good by the time the day was over. At Charlotte, everybody had their cars all shiny, maybe not new sheet metal but at least beaten back out and 'Bondoed' and painted up again."
Not only do the drivers put a lot of effort into racing at Charlotte, so do the fans who pilgrimage here to be a part of something charismatic and out of the norm.
Wheeler is the consummate professional, which is why the fans continue to pour their dollars into Lowe's Motor Speedway. He calls one of his new plans "Fan First," but fans have always been first at the former Charlotte Motor Speedway.
They come from all over country to the 1.5-mile track. They'll pack in like sardines this weekend -- both to see their heroes race cars and to enjoy the facility that hosts the circuit.
Wheeler's innovations are never-ending and the never leave out the people who pay the bills -- those fans that come year after year.
Each May, with the crowd from the Coca-Cola 600 gathering in the grandstands, Wheeler invites the U.S. Armed Forces in for a Memorial Day tribute to the men in arms. As howitzers rumble from the infield and paratroopers float in from the stars, the man on the real mission looks over his crowd.
It's not the helicopters or the planes or the cannons that matter, it's the fan approval. The servicemen and women in uniform will write this off as a recruiting mission, Wheeler uses it as interaction of which his fans can say they were there when Lowe's Motor Speedway turned ground zero and became Normandy for a day.
But, it's his fall event which shines with imagination. It's the pre-race stunt show -- usually a stunt that shouldn't be stunted -- that Wheeler helps create. Whether it's a bus jumping junk cars or a junk car jumping portable potties or a motorcycle maniac on a car crunching, death-defying leap through the infield, it is Wheeler's creation.
And, not only does he enjoy the expressions of the fans faces, but he's almost always the first person to promote the guy who completed the mission.
This is every kid's dream -- to be a part of something seemingly limitless and in control of the action. For Wheeler that means creative control at Lowe's Motor Speedway and he specializes in that field.
Phil Furr, a freelance writer based in Charlotte, N.C., writes a weekly auto-racing column for ESPN.com. | |
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