WHEELS: A Season on Nascar's Winston Cup Circuit

What began fifty years ago as a deadly cat-and-mouse game between wild-hare moonshine runners and grim old sheriffs on the twisting back roads of the southern Appalachians has evolved into the hottest sport in America: NASCAR's Winston Cup Series. The drivers aren't exactly good old boys anymore and the corporatization of stock car racing has turned NASCAR into a multirnillion-dollar enterprise, but the irreverent roots of the sport cannot he denied. In Wheels, critically acclaimed writer Paul Hemphill tells the story of this fascinating sport through the events of the 1996 Winston Cup season.

When Tom Wolfe immortalized NASCAR's legendary Junior Johnson as 'The Last American Hero," the sport's beginnings were revealed: Young men, between bouts of hauling whiskey and trying to elude the law, turned their misdoings into a sport of fearless daredevils in lightning-fast cars competing at dirt tracks all over the South. But when Junior convinced tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds to sponsor the NASCAR circuit, stock car racing changed forever.

In Wheels, Paul Hemphill explores this transformation and, in doing so, takes the reader on an unparalleled journey through the multifaceted world that is stock car racing: into the corporate offices, where public relations gurus teach the drivers how to address the media after a victory or how to speak to the camera in a commercial; to the races, where a split second's reaction time often spells the difference between disaster and victory; to the busy garages where grease monkeys tinker with 700- horsepower engines in order to get an edge on the competition; and into the infields of the tracks where southern boys and their ladies whoop it up, drink beer, and hoot and holler for their favorite drivers and cars. Hemphill further profiles the drivers themselves: the mean, all-business Dale Earnhardt—the Intimidator—perhaps the greatest NASCAR driver of all time; the preppy twenty-live-year-old Christian wunderkind. Jeff Gordon—the Kid—the blossoming Madison Avenue—approved future of the sport; Terry Labonte, the solid, soft-spoken driver whose consistent top-five finishes earned him enough points to capture the coveted season-long Winston Cup Championship; and many of the others from similar blue-collar backgrounds, fighting for a piece of the purse that could make or break their entire season.

Yet Wheels is also about a lot more than just racing. It's about a culture, a personality; it's about the last gasps of a distinct regional identity faced with the sanitizing influences of corporate America. Simply put, Wheels is a chronicle of Bubba's last stand.

The Nashville Sound: "Hemphill has written not just a book about country music, but a sensitive, acute, true book about America."

Too Old to Cry: "Mr. Hemphill gives us portraits of his heroes, most of whom came up the hard way to make it in the world of sports or country music, that are illuminated by the reflection of his own down-home values."

Me and the Boy: "ultimately, it is the intriguing and insightfully confessional tone of Hemphill's narrative, as he delicately balances painful candor, ruthless self-examination, and outright self-pity, that gives Me and the Boy the power, pathos, and enlightenment of a finely written, well-paced novel."