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Noise and digestion: Is there a link? It may seem an irrelevant question. But then you're probably not watching a NASCAR race on the shadeless Daytona International Speedway, as the 94 F Florida sun beats down on your pink and puny head like an intergalactic microwave. Meanwhile, 43 stock cars blast past at 195 miles an hour like a thousand chainsaws revving at once in your inner ear. The noise and the heat vibrate across your skin and hands and chest and then into your stomach and lungs and heart, before ringing out through your brain. Imagine that Jimi Hendrix used your head as an amplifier for four hours. The question is: Does that din enhance the appetite?

"We should try the food at a NASCAR race," I had said to my brother Tim one afternoon in May. It was an appealing idea: It entailed food.

But Tim looked skeptical. That wasn't a good sign. We've taken gruesome eating trips before: days of nothing but lobster, an entire afternoon of fried clams and one memorably binding weekend of artisanal cheese in Quebec. We're brothers, after all: We can talk, but we like to cook and eat and talk even more. He's a sophisticated gourmet cook and an adventuresome eater, with an optimistic view of the body's capacity for cholesterol.

In fact, hesitation over any kind of food whatsoever is most unusual in my dear younger (but older-looking) brother: I was suddenly alarmed. Maybe he had ... political objections to NASCAR?

"It'll be fascinating, at the very least," I said. "The great American redneck ritual, revealed."

"NASCAR?" he said.

"Fried baloney and turkey legs?"

So that was it. He didn't want to be bored by the food.

I was armed for that. Not any more, I replied. The races of NASCAR (the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) are now the most popular live spectator sport in the United States. The television audience is second only to the National Football League's. The TV rights alone went for $2.8-billion (U.S.), I told him, and that was in 2001. He's a stockbroker: I figured the money angle would intrigue him.

There was more good news, too. Now that NASCAR's going global, expanding to Mexico, Canada and beyond (Canada hosts its first NASCAR race on Saturday at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve outside Montreal), NASCAR wants the world to know its fans are more than gearheads, especially in culinary matters. They'd even dreamed up a contest, NASCAR Cooks!: The best race-day recipe submitted by a fan over the course of the summer.

My plan, I explained, was to convince people to let us sample their concoctions. The prize was a tailgate party for nine at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama.

Admittedly, Taladega is the tailgating centre of the universe. Admittedly, my brother and I were travelling to Daytona Beach, which is more famous for vomit at spring break.

But Mario Batali was going to Daytona on July 7 for the Pepsi 400. Mario Batali - founder of seven Manhattan restaurants, culinary inventor, star of the Food Network and the Iron Chef America series, subject of Bill Buford's best-selling book, Heat. Mr. Batali had even written a race food cookbook, Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style, that sold 300,000 copies. If NASCAR food was good enough for him, it was good enough for my fancy brother.

We agreed to rendezvous in Florida at the Daytona International Speedway FanZone, where for $60 on top of the $140 ticket price (plus $50 for parking), fans can buy beer, watch their favourite team's mechanics tend to the cars, and even buy a used racing tire.

"We actually bought one of Richard Petty's," a woman told me. "It's in my spare room. And it's a coffee table."

To my surprise, Tim turned up in a checked shirt and shorts, with a baseball cap and a beard - the uniform of the NASCAR redneck. "Who are you?" I said. "Zelig?"

He eyed my straw fedora. "This is NASCAR," he said, "not Indiana Jones."

He surveyed the crowd. "First thing," he said. "The poundage. I feel like I'm back in Illinois." Twenty yards away at the Budweiser Bistro, six of the hugest people I've ever seen were sitting around a bar table. Their hindquarters overflowed their chairs so much - and they were big bucket seats to start with - that each buttock pressed up against the one on either side of it, to form a perfect circle of flesh. From outer space, they must have resembled an enormous boutonniere. And they weren't alone.

NASCAR food was obviously plentiful (hence their girth); but (given their girth) would there be any left for us? And would it be any good at all?

To shore up our spirits, I stepped over to a stand called You Gotta Eat, and bought a hot dog. This was old NASCAR food. Unfortunately, the hot dog had a large yellow spot. "What's this?" Tim said. "Impetigo?" We ate it anyway.

That was when we noticed a booth called Race Wines. Race Wines sells a 2005 cabernet sauvignon from California's central coast in specially etched bottles painted with the NASCAR logo. It was a little weird, for wine: the three bottles in the $147 Earnhardt commemorative set, for instance, each bore a different date: Feb. 15, 1998, the year the legendary Dale Earnhardt Sr. won the Daytona 500; Feb. 18, 2001, the day he was killed on the last corner of the last lap of the Daytona 500; and Feb. 15, 2004, the day his son, Dale Earnhardt Jr., won it.

Still - wine at NASCAR. Jeff Gordon, the leading driver of the NASCAR series, had launched his own wine label, and several team owners had full wineries. That had to be a good sign. Didn't it?

The next morning, I headed to the Daytona International Speedway, which is to stock car fans what, say, the Golden Temple at Amritsar is to a Sikh. True, Amritsar means "Pool of the Nectar of Immortality," and Daytona is an infernal noise demon on speed, but they're both spiritual places, man.

If Formula One cars are the upper class of racing, with their finicky narrow European bodies and snooty individuated wheels and buzzy engines, NASCAR occupies the bottom of the status ladder. NASCAR racers are stock cars - souped-up and trimmed down beyond comparison, but made in the United States to more or less resemble the cars ordinary North Americans drive. "That's sort of what we count on for our core appeal," a young NASCAR official, Scott Warfield, told me as he showed me around. "Everyone does this every day. Everyone drives ..."

Unlike F1, NASCAR drivers more often race on ovals, circling only to the left. The concept of braking barely exists at Daytona: The cars move in a pack, inches apart and trying to bump each other off the road, ratchet themselves up to 190 mph, and stay there.

The first stock car drivers - most famously Junior Johnson - learned to race by eluding the North Carolina police on mountain roads as they delivered moonshine from local stills. There were so many good drivers going so fast, delivering so much 'shine before it went off and soured and 'sploded, as 'shine is wont to do, that a man named Bill France decided to organize the informal races the drivers staged in their spare time.

Mr. France knew what speed felt like, and how exciting it was to watch. He'd raced on Daytona's famous beach, where Sir Malcolm Campbell first broke 200 mph in 1928. Mr. France built the Daytona International Speedway to be the new beach.

Today it's an asphalt oval four lanes wide and 2.5 miles around. Its four corners are three storeys high and banked at a 31-degree angle - a giant saucer of speed.

A grandstand a mile long runs down one side, another down the backstretch. The France family still owns it, a handful of other racetracks, and the licence to NASCAR, all through a private company called International Speedway Corp.

But it's the infield where the food fans live. For up to five days at a time, infielders live cheek by jowl in everything from safari tents with satellite hookups to $1-million expandable motor homes, complete with air conditioners, 28,000 BTU gas grills and 72-inch flat-screen TVs (panelled in oak, no less).

The infield at Daytona is so huge it has suburbs. A four-day RV spot for the Pepsi 400 in the most exclusive zone runs $950 a couple. NASCAR fans may once have been rednecks, but they're anything but poor.

Mario Batali resembles a large bottle of Pepto-Bismol this morning: pink shirt, pink socks, knee-length pink carpenter shorts, his trademark orange Gator clogs, mirrored sunglasses and his red hair pulled back in a ponytail. The famous chef has just made a couple of Caramba burgers on camera for ESPN, promoting NASCAR and NASCAR Cooks! and his own NASCAR cookbook in a single sear. Now he's cooling off inside, where the air conditioning is kinder to his pyramidal frame.

Mr. Batali is NASCAR's ambassador of eating, but he's a fan of speed as well. He owned a $300,000 Ferrari before he "handed in the keys to my testicles" and switched to a Vespa and a minivan.

"I discovered NASCAR about four years ago at a three-eighths of a mile track in New Jersey called" - he deepens his voice, like a racetrack announcer - "Wall Speedway. They had these full-size cars running around a tiny little track about the size of this room. The next race I went to was in Dover, Delaware, the" - announcer voice again -"Monster Mile. You have to say it that way, all the tracks with big names. And as I'm wandering the infield, what I discovered was that on one row, more than half the people were cooking crab cakes.

"I didn't think crab cakes were NASCAR food. I just figured, you know, hamburgers, bratwurst, maybe the fried turkey for the supercore fan. But what I discovered was that NASCAR is specifically about the micro-regional cooking of America. ... Each of these racetracks not only had its own kind of history of who won there, but also a kind of undisclosed gastronomic point of view."

In Texas, it was barbecued beef. In New Hampshire, it was lobster rolls. Michigan had bratwurst. (Montreal could have any numbers of offerings. Think of the possibilities for Quebec's artisanal cheese. Then again, remembering my adventure there with Tim, perhaps not.) Mr. Batali's theory certainly explains all the venison and duck I've seen at Daytona - ex-military Floridians who like to hunt.

"So you don't think volume and vibration are antithetical to digestion?" This is my question.

"Oh, nooooo. They're exciting. And they're crucial. You gotta get your mojo going before you can really digest something."

"Have you discovered the undisclosed gastronomic point of view of Daytona?" I ask, thinking of the cheese grits I had for breakfast at the Bob Evan's outlet.

"Not yet," Mr. Batali admits. "It seems to be more about breasts, from what I can tell."

This is true: There is so much cleavage displayed so wantonly all over town, and especially at the raceway, I've begun to think of breasts as Daytonas.

"They do grouper sandwiches, fried grouper, a lotta shrimp. I find the gastronomic point of view of Florida is often about New Orleans cajun-creole flavours."

Whereupon he gets up to cook some more Caramba burgers, this time for the Speed Channel. He'll make 17 in the course of the day. Two assistants mix the meat: beef - ground chuck only, for moistness - green chilies, pickled jalapenos, chipotle peppers, chili powder, salsa and the lightest of handling. Mr. Batali does the grilling, to the barest medium rare. Then he climbs off the stage and hands me a burger. Plain, standard issue, small white bun, as it should be.

It could be the best hamburger I've ever tasted. Maybe vibrations do make you hungry. I consume it in three bites. Then he hands me another one in a napkin for my brother, who has been delayed. I stuff it in my briefcase.

Twenty minutes later I meet up with Tim. "Here's a burger, from Mario," I say.

He eats it. "Delicious. Best hamburger I've ever had." Things are looking up.

By 1:15 p.m. the scent of meat grilling on barbecues in the infield begins to mix with the tang of vaporized gas and burning rubber from cars practising on the track. That can only mean lunch. Tim and I begin to stalk the infield. Our plan is to tell people we're investigating NASCAR food, in the hope they'll let us try theirs.

But people aren't exactly handing stuff out. Campers are always worried they don't have enough and may starve to death.

I can see 50 pounds of crab meat in one Rubbermaid cooler, 30 pounds of ribs in another. I can also see adults playing horseshoes, except that they're playing it with traffic cones and plastic toilet seats. This is America, land of plenty.

We meet the Merrill sisters - Anne, Barbara, Biffy and Susan of Sarasota County, Fla., and Richmond, Va. - as they sit down to mojitos, having made a cheesecake, baked bread from scratch and whipped up some yogurt in their yogurt maker, all in their RV. "We're pretty much middle-class people, and have advanced degrees, so its not all rednecks," Susan says.

They're lovely. But do they offer us food? No.

Down the road, Earl Hannesson and Todd Knop , two ex-Navy men who now work for defence contractors, have cooked eight pounds of deer sausage for lunch, have venison steaks for tonight and plan venison burritos for breakfast tomorrow. "Come by and have some," they say. "Tomorrow."

Across the way Tommy Hebert is working his daiquiri machine - a real one, three feet square. He, at least, makes me a strawberry daiquiri. It's everything a strawberry daiquiri should be. "I just like to be here," he says. "We die soon enough. We got to have fun while we can."

This is why the infield at a NASCAR race can feel like you've wandered into the automotive department of the American Dream. There are people sitting in lawn chairs under RV awnings, and other people sitting on lawn chairs up to their chests in portable RV swimming pools. They talk to anyone. They go shirtless, braless, regardless. The races let people be who they are, as opposed to who they think they should be.

"That's what I don't get about the Americans," Tim says, eyeing fields of RVs. "They work hard, they make some money, and then they want to go and live in a bus on the asphalt, inches from each other."

But for a lot of patriotic citizens of the country that invented the car and the superhighway and glorified life on the road, NASCAR is nothing less than a church that lets them worship roadside civilization. "What you'll see if you wander the grounds," Mr. Batali says, "is people who have been coming to the race for years, and they're always next to the same people. They have these friendships based on the sharing of the food and the camaraderie of being in the same place at the same time every year. It's Americans at their leisure." But sometimes it makes you wonder how lonely they must be the rest of the time.

It's only the next afternoon that Tim remembers the golden rule of camping: To get people to give us food, we have to give them some of ours.

Fortunately we meet Harry Haney, a contractor from Land O'Lakes, Fla., who's cooking meatballs and a pot of sausages. We admire his Brinkman smoker; he hands us a huge bag of venison jerky, the spawn of said smoker. "You like spicy?" he says. We allow that we do, demurring all the while. "Take it." He insists.

The jerky's smooth and compulsively edible, but we manage to restrain ourselves. Fifteen RVs down the road, we trade some to Carl Britt, of Metter, Ga., for two bags of the Georgia peanuts he's boiling in a pot. I've never had boiled peanuts: I recommend them, by the pound. Tim manages to trade another strip of our venison for some revolting alligator jerky, and is summarily prohibited from further food negotiations. I even manage a dinner invitation to Louisiana-style catfish fry from Jenifer McDine of Napoleonville, La. - the fish seasoned with hot sauce, lemon pepper, mustard, then battered with Zatarain's fish mixture - but we have to keep moving. We trade the last of our peanuts for a beer.

That's when we find a skinny guy named Jeff Biddle cooking split chicken in his secret mustard sauce -sesame seed oil, Dijon mustard, teriyaki sauce, "a little bit Woostshir,' " balsamic vinegar and Mountain Dew. Yes, it sounds hideous, but you never know. "You gotta make a temperature," Mr. Biddle says. "But 10 to 15 degrees before that, you gotta put in Mother's marinade." He's just eaten some tiger shrimp dipped in barbecue sauce, breaded and then fried. He tells us about smoking ribs with black jack oak, a Florida wood "that smells like earth from the Great Plains."

"Why are you smoking the chicken, and not grilling it?"

"Dude," he says, "It used to be that way, with rules. But with Polident, you can do anything. And TV makes a difference." He means that TV cooking shows have loosened NASCAR cooking up. "This is America. You're allowed to do whatever you want."

Tim had to leave early the afternoon of the Pepsi 400, so I went to the race alone. I never thought I'd like it. But the race, in the end, is what draws everyone back, even more than the party.

I climbed up into the packed bleachers on the homestretch. An usher named Wayne Cole began to explain drafting and blocking. Miss Florida sang the anthem.

Dusk fell and the sky went purple as the engines throttled up and a mile and a half of bleachers began to pop with flashbulbs. Mr. Cole took me down to track level, and we waited for the cars to wind by. "It's so cool," he said. "It's so quiet, and then whoosh. Hold on to your hat."

Then 43 cars blasted past me at 195 mph, 10 feet from where I was standing. It was like nothing I've ever experienced: a vast scream of technological pride, but sad as well, as if the entire hopeful history of the United States was passing in an instant. I kept thinking of Rome and the Coliseum.

The first collision and caution happened on the third lap. Pit crews swarmed cars like mites, gas and four new tires, 14 seconds.

The noise never let up. Every 45 seconds the knot screamed by again, and every time the order had changed - sometimes single file, sometimes four across, drafting, bumping, six inches apart and accelerating. It looked awfully dangerous. With 25 laps left, 168,000 people in the stands stood up. With 10 laps left they started to shout. Finally, after 400 miles and 2½ hours of racing, Jamie McMurray in car No. 26 crossed the finish line a few inches and .0005 of a second ahead of Kyle Busch.

A few inches, in 400 miles. All the money and all the competition and all the sponsors, down to nothing at all. I wished my brother had been there. He would have loved that.

I took my time leaving and ate near the hotel, a place called the Wing House. The meal was fine. It's just not something I like to do alone.

***

A smooth finish

It's a long way from moonshine to merlot, but distances always seem shorter you're moving at 195 miles an hour.

NASCAR, the sport that grew out of the whisky-running, hot-rod demimonde of America's Prohibition-era South, isn't all crab cakes and smoked Dijon chicken these days. The fans - and drivers - have also worked up a powerful thirst for wine.

Budweiser may be the stock car association's official beverage, but according to market researcher ACNielsen, wine drinking among NASCAR fans is officially soaring, up 22 per cent last year from 2005, far outpacing the 7-per-cent growth in the United States wine market.

Several prominent racing personalities now make wine, including top-ranked driver Jeff Gordon, and Richard Childress, owner of three teams. Both labels are regrettably available only south of the border. Mario Andretti, the Italian-born legend who not only raced NASCAR but also Indy-circuit and Formula One cars, started his own Napa Valley winery in the mid-1990s. His products are sporadically available in some Canadian provinces.

Wineries, too, are pouring in with sponsorships, plastering logos on cars where beer, motor oil and cigarettes once reigned. Among them are Ravenswood, a Sonoma winery that sponsors a Busch Series No. 27 car, and Bennett Lane, the Napa Valley winery that owns the No. 2 car in the NASCAR West Series.

At Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, in the heart of northern California wine country, pinot noir vines have been planted around the track and may one day produce an Infineon-branded wine.

WINNING WINES

Andretti Winery, California

The world's most famous and adored living driver, the retired Mario Andretti makes a broad range of reds and whites, including the excellent Montona Cabernet Sauvignon, about $65.

Childress Vineyards, North Carolina

Richard Childress owns three top NASCAR teams and produces a huge array of wines in the Yadkin Valley, including such specialty bottlings as Daytona Meritage.

Jeff Gordon Collection, California

Launched two years ago by the NASCAR Cup Series champion. Includes an acclaimed $60 (U.S.) chardonnay.

Lewis Cellars, California

A top-ranked winery owned by Randy Lewis, a former driver and veteran of five Indy 500s. Alec's Blend, a high-end syrah-cabernet red, costs $60.

Beppi Crosariol

***

Montreal NASCAR:

Beyond tailgating

NASCAR fans are famous for throwing tailgate parties, barbecuing steaks and hamburgers at the foot of their cars to the sound of churning motors.

But at NASCAR's first Canadian event, the NAPA Auto Parts 200, the best dining will take place away from the track.

Montreal's Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, also home to Formula One's Canadian Grand Prix, has no public parking. Thousands of fans will be arriving this Friday by subway and are only permitted to bring coolers that fit under their seats.

So organizers are telling fans to get out and enjoy Montreal.

"Everyone understands the vibrancy of the city," says Tracey Judd, NASCAR Busch Series spokeswoman. "We are telling people to go have a new experience."

Organizers have put together a list of top Montreal restaurants aimed at meat lovers, such as La Queue de Cheval, known for its corn-fed beef, Le Club Chasse et Pêche, famous for a foie gras risotto, and the Beaver Club, one of the city's oldest restaurants, currently serving piglet braised in maple syrup and vinegar.

They can also catch a Pearl Jam cover band or a motor-cross demonstration on Crescent Street, closed to traffic for a festival sponsored by Ford.

During the race there will be the usual fast-food eats as well as chicken souvlaki, tomato and feta salad and smoked meat sandwiches - all required eating for visitors to Montreal.

NASCAR officials and car crews, however, will cook their own meals, as they do at each race site, Ms. Judd says.

About 45 teams are expected, each comprising 30 to 50 mechanics, engineers and other technical support, who spend most of the year travelling to races together.

Add to that about 200 NASCAR officials spending 12-hour days at the track overseeing safety, public relations and race operations.

Crew members, even those with master's degrees, take a turn on cooking duty. "It's all part of life on the road," Ms. Judd says.

Rick Noble, a NASCAR safety official from Farmer City, Ill., can make anything from steak to lasagna on a grill. Breakfast could be Pop-Tarts and sausages, lunch bratwurst and dinner chicken burgers.

"There is always meat," he says.

Heather Sokoloff

The NAPA Auto Parts 200

at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve

is in Montreal on Friday and

Saturday, 514-397-0007

*****

ibrown@globeandmail.com

******

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