Wide Open

Rating:
Summary: Bravo! Greatest book on Nascar!
Review: Amazing! A true page turner! I never imaged what a nascar driver goes through in a typical season. The book truely captures the essence of nascar. I will recommend this book to all my friends.

Rating:
Summary: Bravo! Greatest book on Nascar!
Review: I've been a NASCAR fan since a kid when my family was a member of Bob Bahre's Daytona entourage. We'd all trek down from Maine in the late seventies and catch the big race. Even then, racing wasn't exclusive to south of the mason-dixon. Wide Open recognizes this. Assael, a former NYC Crime reporter, writes as a journalist hot on a story, and he finds lots of stories. Most are enlightening and interesting, like his look at the car wars or the discrepencies between the leading teams and the lesser ones. Some I could have lived without, like Junior Johnson's painful divorce and Richard Petty's election run. All and all, though, this is a great look at racing. New fans and old fans will love it.

Rating:
Summary: Great inside information
Review: It's much more fun to follow NASCAR now that I know the stories behind the racers and the events,and the history of the sport. This book is a fast, fun read! I've given this book as gifts with good results.

Rating:
Summary: Great inside information
Review: It's much more fun to follow NASCAR now that I know the stories behind the racers and the events,and the history of the sport. This book is a fast, fun read! I've given this book as gifts with good results.

Rating:
Summary: Wide Open opened my eyes to the world of Nascar!
Review: Mr. Assael has managed to write a truely readable book about a year in Nascar. I have never been a Nascar fan, nor did I know much about the sport, after reading this terrific book I now watch the races, read about the racers and keep a close eye on the championship standings.

Rating:
Summary: Incorrect, but interesting
Review: This is a must if you are interested in NASCAR. I chose a group of books as research for starting a race team, this is one I chose. You will be in the scene of some of NASCAR Winston Cup teams for the year, the up's and down's the excitement and the heartache of a year behind owning, running and surviving the "Cup". Think you can handle a year in NASCAR? Read this to find out, it will change your perspective.

Rating:
Summary: Intimate look into the Winston Cup tour.
Review: When he arrived at Daytona International Speedway in February of 1996, Shaun Assael had no idea who to write about for his book Wide Open, Days And Nights On The NASCAR Tour. After extensive searching, he decided that the focus of his look at one of NASCAR's most amazing seasons in memory would be on three drivers of different circumstances. He focused on Dave Marcis, the last of the independents; Brett Bodine, the newest owner-driver, trying to make something happen; and Bobby Hamilton, hungry for his first win and smarting from condemnations of mediocrity through his Winston Cup career.

Assael starts with the 1996 Daytona 500, and right away things go wrong - Brett Bodine loses a car to fire on the racetrack. In spite of that, the team brought out a backup car that seemed to run better. But then that was destroyed in a crash in the first of Daytona's 125 mile qualifying races for the 500. Nonetheless, Brett managed to get into the race, only to lose a third car in a nasty pileup at about 300 miles in the 500.

Bobby Hamilton finished an inglorious 20th in the 500 but a week later at Rockingham, NC, it appeared he would break out. The week before the Daytona 500, Hamilton had seen the burial of his father, and it seemed to bring out a fire in him. At Rockingham Hamilton timed very well, and in the final 100 laps he took the lead with authority. A caution with some 60 to go set up a duel with Dale Earnhardt, one that ranked with the finest showdowns for a race win ever. But when Earnhardt clipped Hamilton's Pontiac coming out of Rockingham's treacherous fourth turn on Lap 343, Hamilton slapped the wall. Livid and determined to win, he overdrove the car and finally crashed. Hamilton's frustrated soliloquy to ESPN afterward became one the best soundbites in all of sports.

And so it goes. Assael delves into the lives of his three subjects very deeply. Along the way he branches out very effectively, such as when Hamilton and John Andretti crunched fenders during and after the ensuing Richmond 400. Richard Petty, Hamilton's car owner, walked into the trailer of his former driver Andretti, and calmly vowed to "whip his (posterior) if he ever took it out on my car again. He wants to beat on my driver, fine. But don't take it out on my racecar." There is a double irony here; years earlier Hamilton, driving for the now-defunct George Bradshaw team, tagged Richard Petty at North Wilkesboro, and Petty told Hamilton, "Don't jack with me. I'll do it four times worse to you." His similar warning to John Andretti was an ironic precursor to Andretti's present day sojourn behind the wheel of Petty's STP Pontiac.

Assael deals with Brett and his often-tumultuous relationship with older brother Geoff. Strain developed between the two after Geoff purchased the race team of former champion Alan Kulwicki in 1992. The strain exploded in a wreck at the 1994 Brickyard 400, and the brothers wound up not speaking to one another.

It would take the financial ruin of running their race teams with sponsors coming and going that would bring the two together again. But even then, their careers could not get going. For Brett, it got to the point where, qualifying for the Brickyard 400, his wife Diane was crying, desperately afraid that the team they'd mortgaged their whole lives for was going to die and take them with it.

Dave Marcis never got quite so desperate, but Assael makes clear that his struggles with inferior sponsorship monies were getting him nowhere. "By the end of the 1997 season," Assael notes, "the last of the independents was still hanging on. But barely. Just barely."

Along the way, Assael gives a revealing look at the politics involved in the sport. There is the reason why Geoff Bodine went to Hoosier Tire for the 1994 season, a clip that should serve to disabuse widespread fan notions that favorites are not played by the varied manufacturers - tire and automotive - operating within the sport. Later, Assael deals with Gary Claudio, the head of Pontiac's Winston Cup program, a man striving to get his squadron of racers the kind of winning chances the top Chevrolet and Ford teams always seemed to get. General Motors had united the racing programs of its divisions in 1992 under the leadership of Chevrolet's race boss Herb Fishel, and what resulted was the elimination of all non-Chevrolet programs but Pontiac's. And Pontiac's program was - and is - not given much respect or technical help from GM's Motorsports Technology Group. Assael notes that GM's chief engineerist Terry Laise and then-tech support chief Don Taylor ostensibly worked for both Chevy and Pontiac, but in reality worked almost exclusively with Chevy teams. This erupted into a near-brawl between Petty Enterprises team manager Dale Inman and Laise. "I'm sick of you lying to me," Inman growled.

Further hurting Pontiac was the utter lack of cooperation by one of its best teams, SABCO. In the autumn of 1994 team owner Felix Sabates had been given blueprints for the new Pontiac bodystyle that would debut at the '96 Daytona 500. He'd been told to build a prototype for testing beginning in early 1995. Incredibly, no attempt was made by SABCO to build a Pontiac prototype, and having lost some nine months, Pontiac turned to Chuck Rider's Bahari team for prototype work. The nine months lost because of SABCO indifference left Pontiac way behind the curve entering 1996.

Amid all this, the 1996 season went on. Hamilton raced on, through the pain of a savage head-on crash during a late-June test session at Indianapolis, and through the strain of his car owner's apparant lack of confidence in his driver. At Martinsville in September, Hamilton led 334 laps and lost the event only because an air wrench jammed on the car's final stop. Petty had asked Bobby's wife Debbie, "Why won't he go to the front?" much to the surprise and anger of Debbie. When the race ended, she asked if Richard had changed his mind on Bobby. "Nope," was his curt response.

Dave Marcis and Brett Bodine, meanwhile, continued on, trying to get something out of basically nothing. They didn't have the backing or the racecars to get to the front, and hard as they tried - they worked harder than most teams all season - they could never get decent finishes. Shaun Assael rightly places his sympathy toward them for their tribulations.

For Hamilton, however, there was a happy ending. Phoenix International Raceway awarded him with a hard earned and very deserving first victory. It was the first win for Petty Enterprises since October of 1983 - Richard would win two races in 1984, driving for a different team, Curb Motorsports - and Assael notes that crew chief Robbie Loomis went looking for Dale Inman to bring him to victory lane, and didn't find him until he spotted him coming out of a men's room, his eyes swollen and red, as though from sobbing.

Assael's book is a tremendously engrossing look at NASCAR through three of its drivers. It leaves you respecting these and others like them all the more.