Here’s to you Sir! goes NASCAR
It’s not just champagne wishes and caviar dreams for the folks at “Here’s to you Sir.” Sometimes, we like to get down and dirty with our southern roots for some good ol’ NASCAR racing. For me, the event that is race-day is the only truly appealing part of racing. I don’t watch it on TV. I don’t follow any one driver or team. I don’t know who’s popular, or unpopular, or winning the points race. The drivers I cheered for this year were the two Red Bull Racing team members (Scott Speed and Reed Sorenson), solely because I bought a cool Red Bull Racing hat that afternoon. It seemed only appropriate. But, there are three things NASCAR has going for it:
1. Those cars go really really freaking fast. Seriously. You have no idea how fast they drive, how close together they are, and how kinda awesome it is to see in person.
2. You can bring your own beer. I’ll retype that for emphasis. YOU CAN BRING YOUR OWN BEER.
3. The people watching is second to none.
So, in lieu of a fully actualized story, I’m going to switch things up a bit and do a numerical summary of my day at the NASCAR race that hopefully captures this magical event:
- Number of people in the parking lots tailgating, playing cornhole, grilling, and drinking: Thousands
- Number of lawn chairs we had to accommodate the four people in our group: 1
- Number of bands we watched performing before the race: 2 (Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ and Foreigner)
- Number of songs that I recognized, combined, that were performed by the above bands: 3
- Temperature in my truck while in the parking lot: approximately 90 degrees
- Temperature necessary to easily separate the filling from both sides of an Oreo cookie, allowing you to make a quintuple stuffed Oreo (pictured below): approximately 90 degrees
Quintuple Stuffed Oreo - 5x more delicious than a regular Oreo
- Number of people wearing at least one piece of camouflage clothing: too numerous to count
- Number of people I almost didn’t see because they were wearing full camouflage: 3
- Number of people who thought it would be funny to “dress up like a redneck” for the race: 3
- Number of people who, after passing the above people, probably wanted to punch them in the face: too numerous to count
- Number of laps two of the people “dressed as rednecks” sat in their seats with their fingers in their ears because they didn’t know they needed earplugs: about 15 (picture below)
Mullet wigs? Check. Ear plugs? Who needs ear plugs?
- After a mediocre foot-long corn dog last year, number of foot-long corn dogs I intended to eat this year: 0
- Number of foot-long corn dogs I actually ate this year: 1
- Number of mustard stains on my shirt from the aforementioned foot-long corn dog: 3
- Age of the people this photo-op display (pictured below) is probably designed for: 10
- My age: 31 (probably doesn’t help that Fatty McButterPants is also too big to hide behind Tony Stewart’s cardboard shoulders)
- Number of bathroom breaks I took during the 6 hours I spent in the grandstands: 3
- Number of my friends that will believe I only took 3 bathroom breaks in 6 hours: 0
- Number of relatives we ran into: 4
- Of the people that I knew were at the race, the number of them that I saw: 0
- Number of cars that blew up into an enormous rolling ball of flames: 1
- Number of cars that blew up into an enormous rolling ball of flames that also happened to be one of the two drivers I decided to support that day: 1 (Scott Speed escaped his car uninjured)
- Number of showers it took to get the lovely odor of exhaust fumes, motor oil, and burnt tire rubber off of me: 2
- Number of days after the race I was coughing up black stuff: 3
- Number of washes it took to get the greasy nastiness out of my clothes: Surprisingly, just 1
- And finally…..of the probably 80,000+ people in attendance, the number of Asian people I saw all day: 1
