The Nascar Air Force

Forty-three stock cars are thundering around the track in the MBNA Gold 400 faster than the average cruising speed of many general aviation airplanes. The bowl-shaped stands of the Dover Downs International Speedway in Dover, Delaware, provide a great view for spectators while amplifying the screaming clatter. On this Sunday afternoon, the few greenhorn spectators without earplugs hear only the rattling of the anvil and stirrup bones in their ears — perceived by the brain as a buzz saw attacking concrete. They won't hear well again until Monday afternoon.

It's surprising that the pistons remain in the engine blocks of these 725-horsepower Winston Cup Series engines. For those new to racing the Winston Cup Series is, to borrow a phrase, king of the hill, top of the heap.

Advertising-covered race cars flash before fans who are dressed in T-shirts decorated in their favorite car's gaudy colors. The aroma of fried chicken and hamburgers from sponsors' VIP tents behind the bleachers mingles with the smell of burning rubber from new racing tires growing old fast.

Nascar Winston Cup races attract 6 million spectators and 177 million television viewers each year. Spectator interest has exploded in the last five years, making Nascar — the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing — a marketing leviathan. There are race car Jell-O (a car sponsor) molds in your local grocery store, race car models at the nearest Texaco (also a car sponsor), and Nascar souvenir stores in towns that don't even have tracks. Fans are unusually loyal, eating Cheerios for breakfast if they like Johnny Benson's 26 car, but Kellogg's Corn Flakes if they support Terry Labonte's 5 car. (Around Nascar you never say "the number 26 car," but instead "the 26 car" or "the 5 car," unless you want people to think you are a rookie.)

With the explosion in interest has come an explosion in the schedule: There were 36 races in all corners of the country last year. More tracks are under construction and the number of races will grow. A schedule like that can only be met through use of general aviation, a fact not lost on aircraft manufacturers. VisionAire, for example, has targeted all of racing as one of the best markets for its Vantage jet now in development. Last July, the company sponsored the VisionAire 500, part of the Indy Racing League, at the Charlotte (North Carolina) Motor Speedway. In all, VisionAire has sponsored the VisionAire 500 twice, a drag race, and four cars ranging from drag racers and stock cars to Indy-style open-wheel race cars. Next year VisionAire will sponsor a car racing in the Nascar Busch Series, a younger cousin to the Winston Cup Series.

"There is no question that the racing schedules are getting bigger and more hectic each year," said Tim Beverly, a pilot and owner of Tyler Jet Motorsports. "The only way to survive and budget your time wisely is by flying yourself. Drivers can't physically handle the race schedule, sponsor demands, and personal commitments without a plane. You justify all the costs when you look back over the course of a year and realize that you have saved yourself more than two weeks' worth of hours by flying privately rather than on a commercial airline."

Included among the pilot-drivers are Mark Martin and Rusty Wallace, who claimed in a Sports Illustrated interview that the Learjet 31A he pilots is the fastest aircraft on the Nascar circuit. Although not pilots, three-time and current Winston Cup champion Jeff Gordon and two-time champion Terry Labonte (1984 and 1996) also ride to work in Learjets. Martin, Gordon's closest competitor for last year's Winston Cup champion title, lives in a fly-in community in Florida and commutes to races in his Cessna CitationJet.

Gordon drives for Hendrick Motorsports, which owns three Winston Cup cars and a race truck. On any weekend during the season the company must move more than 50 people, and uses five airplanes to do it. The company owns a Gulfstream II, two Beech King Air 200s, and two Beech 1900s. Chief pilot Jay Luckwaldt said he stopped operating into the airport near Talladega, Alabama, when pattern operations became "too dangerous" because of the number of aircraft. Since all the drivers and crews are on the same schedule, they generally end up flying at the same time. Rusty Wallace calls it an aerial convoy, while Doyle Rouse, a pilot for the Richard Childress team, calls it an armada.

It takes a fleet of 120 general aviation aircraft — what might be called the Nascar Air Force — to move the army of pit crews, drivers, and owners. Flight Explorer, the flight tracking software by Dimensions International ( www.dimen-intl.com), captured the phenomenon last year on the Thursday (moving day for most crews) before a July Winston Cup race in Loudon, New Hampshire. The radar blips bubbled up from North Carolina until there was a string of more than 50 aircraft seemingly nose to tail — all headed to the same destination. Eventually they broke into two tracks when the first airways became clogged. Coming home from that race on the following Sunday, aircraft emerged from two airports near the race track. The car sponsors could be seen streaking westward to their headquarters in large northern cities while crews and owners headed back to North Carolina. Mark Martin, driver of the Valvoline 6 car, left the pack in North Carolina and flew to his home in Florida.

"So many planes go to a race that you make your own traffic problems in the system itself," said Jeff Hartmann, pilot of a Beech King Air 200 — the workhorse of the Nascar fleet — for Andy Petree Racing. Hartmann supports the crew of the Skoal Bandit 33 car driven by Kenny Schrader. "In New Hampshire they set up a special routing for the teams. Whatever you file, they still give you the special routing."

Rouse said that the Childress team operates four airplanes — an IAI Westwind II, a Rockwell Sabreliner, a Beech 1900, and a King Air 200. The aircraft move 43 people per weekend. Advance teams go in on Thursday to help with qualifications and testing, and the over-the-wall (pit) crew moves in Sunday morning. Last year Rouse flew 189 hours.

"New controllers who have never seen the glitter of all the airplanes on their scopes all taking off at six or seven in the morning ask, 'Where is everyone going?' But their supervisors know," Rouse said. He praises Atlanta-area controllers for handling the armada best. At a few other airports, departures are delayed by the requirement for clearances, if the weather is IFR, or by the huge conga line of aircraft on the taxiway. Rouse is kept busy in the off season supporting car and racing truck testing, and with business trips for Childress. Rouse supports teams for Daytona 500 winner Dale Earnhardt and driver Mike Skinner, along with a Super Truck racing team.

Jack Roush, owner of the Valvoline, Exide, Primestar, John Deere, and Cheerios cars, said he puts some of his crews on the Race Car Express, a chartered airliner shared jointly by many of the teams, and uses eight private aircraft to transport 58 race crew members. Roush Industries, a high-performance car engineering company in Livonia, Michigan, has branched out into making airplane parts for jet aircraft. He learned to fly because of his need to visit not only the tracks, but also shops in North Carolina where his cars are built. Since earning his pilot certificate he has developed an interest in warbirds, and rebuilt a North American P-51 Mustang. He and Mark Martin, who drives for him, agreed when they both appeared on the television show Ultimate Flights that climbing into a cockpit offers a good way to "get unhooked from the day's events."

Martin added that his CitationJet is, in some ways, easier to fly than the Cessna 340 he once operated, and is "as comfortable as an old pair of shoes." The only adjustment was getting used to seeing waypoints pass by faster, he said. Steve Hmiel, Martin's crew chief, said on the Ultimate Flights show that Nascar aircraft owners are always looking for aircraft speed mods so that they can go a little faster, just like on the track.

While the Nascar fleet has blossomed in the past five or six years with an influx of jets, aviation has always been a part of the racing scene. "Racing was always my first love, but flying has become my passion," says 1983 Winston Cup champion Bobby Allison. His career was cut short from an accident at the Pocono, Pennsylvania, raceway in 1988, but he recovered enough to regain his airman medical certificate. "I bought my first airplane in 1967 and hired an instructor to help me get my pilot's license," he said. "I would fly from one race to the next so I would have more time to race on short tracks during the week between Winston Cup events." Today's car owners share his views on the importance of aviation to Nascar.

"The airplane is as important as any milling lathe or any piece of equipment in the shop, primarily due to what has happened to our schedule," said car owner Richard Childress. "There are more races, and we are going farther to several new racetracks. Aviation is a big part of the budget, but you have to have it."

Fifty years have elapsed since Nascar evolved from cars originally built as moonshine tankers that could outfox the law along North Carolina back roads. Descendents of those tankers shine on today's racetracks at more than 200 mph, but the future of the sport that hooch built clearly depends on still faster machines in the air.

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