Tulsa, Oklahoma (January 28, 2016) - Justin Allgaier drove his race car to his hauler after being eliminated at the Chili Bowl one Saturday years ago and was met by his questioning father. His dad wanted to know what had happened out on the race track.
Justin had driven a conservative race, never challenging for position, and allowing, it appeared, other cars to pass him without putting up much of a fight. He had missed transferring to the next race by one spot. With even a little bit of aggression, Justin would have certainly finished higher and gone on to the next race. What, his dad wanted to know, had happened?
Still in the cockpit, Justin explained to his dad that the steering was out. To prove it, he spun the wheel. The tires stayed locked, pointed straight ahead. His dad was baffled then, and he remains so today. The question changed from why had Justin driven such a timid race to how had he driven at all?
The Allgaiers set up their midget car to drive in a circle if he holds the wheel straight. They hang the body closer to the left-side tires and use smaller tires on the left than on the right -- a configuration for the Chili Bowl's quarter-mile banked track.
In the 10-lap race, Allgaier was involved in an accident on the first lap. As he pulled away from the wreck, he realized the steering was broken. He also discovered that if he feathered the brake and the throttle just right, he could circumnavigate the track anyway. For the final nine laps, Allgaier did exactly that. He didn't do well, not by a long shot. But he did well enough that his dad did not know he had no steering until he said so. All of which leaves still one more question -- why did Allgaier stay in a race in which the steering didn't work?
"Because it's the Chili Bowl," Allgaier said.
Ah, the Chili Bowl, a mud-spitting, temper-raising, white-knuckled thrill ride, a weeklong racing extravaganza unlike anything else in the motorsports world, an event so chock full of Americana weirdness from the green flag to the checkered flag that people who have been attending and racing in it for years struggle to conjure the words necessary to describe it. "You can't even explain it to someone who has never been here," said Rico Abreu, who has won the event two years in a row. "It's something the naked eye has to see."
With races at night (as God intended), on dirt (same) and indoors (not so much), the Chili Bowl is the Super Bowl, Lollapalooza, a carnival and a frat party all held at once inside a jet engine that spits out a fine mist of Oklahoma mud.
The Chili Bowl is simultaneously the best-kept secret in racing while having thousands of rabid fans and hundreds of drivers who swear they will never miss the annual pilgrimage to Tulsa. Allgaier and Abreu were among at least seven full-time drivers from NASCAR's top three series to race in this year's Chili Bowl. I attended the event intent on finding out why so many NASCAR drivers would travel to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the middle of January to race indoors on a dirt track for a paycheck that would not cover the cost of the trip.
I came away wondering why so few NASCAR drivers were there.
When Kasey Kahne was 12, he was a huge dirt racing fan who was trying, with no success, to talk his parents into letting him race. He fared better talking them into taking him to races. After a year of Kahne's pleading, his dad relented and took him to the Chili Bowl in 1994. "It was the best vacation you could have as a 12-year-old who wanted to race," Kahne said.
Kahne's strongest memories are of walking around the pit area staring at the cars. He was too shy to talk to any of the drivers, but he imagined himself climbing into one of their cars and wheeling it around the track. He cheered as Andy Hillenburg, one of his favorite drivers, won. Hillenburg took the checkered flag after a thrilling three-wide battle that remains one of the event's iconic moments, in part because Hillenburg is from nearby Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and in part because the track is really not wide enough to accommodate three-wide racing.
As Kahne told this story at this year's Chili Bowl (Jan. 12-16), he looked around the 448,400-square foot Tulsa Expo Center. Dozens of kids, with the same looks on their faces Kahne described having in 1994, wandered from car to car. Fifty feet to Kahne's right stood the grandstands, and beyond that the race track. To his left was the garage area, which looks like a NASCAR garage area, only smaller and indoors.
Also, there was a bulldog wearing a tutu and a ribbon in her hair and posing for pictures.
Among the many reasons NASCAR drivers return to the Chili Bowl year after year is a yearning for the simpler racing days of their youth. That's particularly true of Tony Stewart , who loves the Chili Bowl like a kindergarten teacher loves children. A two-time winner of the event, Stewart has spent the last two years working track maintenance. And while that role landed him in controversy this year, his love for the event has not waned.
Don't mistake the fondness for days gone by for indifference about modern-day Chili Bowl results. The drivers have neither moved on from the event nor outgrown it. This year's Chili Bowl featured a record 335 drivers from 34 states and five countries. And they all wanted to win the "the Golden Driller," the trophy modeled after the 76-foot tall, 43,500-pound statue of an oil man that stands outside the Expo Center.
J.J. Yeley has competed in 21 of the 30 Chili Bowls and attended seven more as a fan. He holds the record for passes in a single day and has finished second, third, fifth and ninth but never first. "Getting close is one of those things that keeps you coming back," he said. "Having a bad week, like I'm having now, is one of those things that keeps you coming back."
Asked if he'd rather win a Sprint Cup race or a Golden Driller, Allgaier paused for a long time and finally said they were equally difficult to win. Stewart said in a pre-race press conference that winning the Chili Bowl was bigger than winning the IndyCar championship. Abreu, who will drive full-time for ThorSport Racing this season in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, said that until he wins either the Daytona 500 or the Indianapolis 500, his two Chili Bowl wins will be the biggest of his career.
On Saturday, Allgaier spent several minutes affixing a GoPro camera to his car. He loves racing video and wanted to get his just right, so he moved the camera around until he found the perfect vantage point. When he finally found an angle he liked -- from up and to the right of where his head would be -- he accidentally dropped the camera into his cockpit. It landed near his foot pedals. To retrieve it, he crawled headfirst through the opening at the top of his car.
His feet shot out of the top as he reached toward the brake and gas. Considering Allgaier once drove the car with no steering, I half-wondered if he was practicing for his next trick. A fan watching this unlikely scene apparently thought the same thing. Channeling what he would be thinking if he were Allgaier, the man said, "Hold my beer: Watch this."
Allgaier couldn't hear that, but he would have been proud to become part of the spectacle because the spectacle is part of what he loves about the Chili Bowl. "You can start at 7 in the morning, and end at 6 in the morning, and still not see everything there is to see," he said.
As if on cue, a man wearing a red and green checkered suit, with Christmas trees in the checkers, walked by. He looked ridiculous, which is to say, he fit right in.
"Why would you wear that?" I asked.
"Why wouldn't you wear that?" Allgaier answered.
Allgaier favors racing shirts. He estimates he has owned 100 different Chili Bowl driver T-shirts over the years and wore an Abreu shirt earlier in the week.
A few haulers down from Allgaier, a boy sat in the back of a racing trailer on Thursday and played with a fishing pole. At the end of his line he affixed a $100 bill. He cast it into the walkway and let it sit there. Every minute or two, somebody bent over to try to pick it up, at which point the boy yanked it away.
A previous fisherman apparently landed the big one: "I may have (fallen for it) the first time I saw it," Kahne said with a smile. "It's pretty funny to watch throughout an afternoon when people are doing that."
I heard a story about a driver who kept a prosthetic arm in his car and threw it out when he needed a caution (that was years ago). I heard about drivers' girlfriends getting in a bar fight (that was this year). I watched as a NASCAR driver's wife and a former NASCAR-driver-turned-team-owner shouted f-bombs at each other (that was Wednesday.)
Three men walked around together posing for pictures. One was dressed as the Stay Puft marshmallow man from the movie "Ghostbusters." Another was dressed as a Ghostbuster. The third was dressed as Cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation, recreating the scene in which he bids Chevy Chase's character good morning and points out that the bathroom of his RV is full.
During a somber rendition of the national anthem, played by a trombonist wearing the Chili Bowl's trademark (by which I mean garish) red, white and blue shirt, a pickup truck circled the track. In the bed of the pickup was Abreu. He was holding an American flag and surrounded by Hooters girls.
Some consider midget cars more fun to drive than stock cars, in large part because the driver matters more. The combination of a short track and the way the cars slide on dirt means a good driver can manhandle a bad car to the front. At the Chili Bowl, there are two distinct grooves: the bottom, which rewards precision, and the top, which rewards aggression.
Kyle Larson's fondest racing memory at the Chili Bowl came when he spun out in the middle of a race in 2013. That's an odd thing to remember so proudly, but then again, the Chili Bowl is an odd race.
Larson simply drove too hard and lost control of the car, and thus ended a heated battle with Sammy and Kevin Swindell, the father-son duo who have won the event a combined nine times. Larson had traded the lead with Kevin before spinning. "I remember when I spun out, looking to the crowd," Larson said. "The place gave me a standing ovation, which was something I'll never forget. The place went crazy."
The Swindells' success makes them hated, of course, because race fans root like crazy for their drivers to be successful and then turn on them when they are. On Saturday this year, Allgaier accidentally ran into the back of Sammy Swindell's car on the final lap of the D main, which caused Swindell to spin to a stop and then watch helplessly as the rest of the field zoomed by. The crowd roared its approval, even though Allgaier hadn't done it on purpose, as he had nothing to gain and everything to lose by hitting Swindell. Allgaier was already comfortably in a transfer position, and making contact with another driver would only put himself in danger of spinning himself out.
But fans never let the facts dissuade them when fisticuffs might be in the offing. Within minutes, dozens of fans crowded around Allgaier's hauler in anticipation that Swindell would confront him there. The area was so crowded with people hoping to see a fight that they might have prevented one -- Swindell could not have gotten there even if he wanted to. Instead, Allgaier went to Swindell's trailer to apologize.
The greatest sign of NASCAR drivers' affinity for the Chili Bowl is that they all keep coming back, even though the race makes them sick -- literally. The illness that besets drivers and fans the week after the event is so common that it has a name: the Chili Bowl Flu. Symptoms include headaches, nausea and a general feeling of terribleness. "It's worse than the flu," Ricky Stenhouse Jr. said.
If the symptoms of the "Chili Bowl Flu" sound suspiciously like the symptoms of a hangover, well, yeah. But it's not only the alcohol. The three basic food groups during the Chili Bowl are deep-fried this, deep-fried that and deep-fried everything else. Yeley's ears ring for three days after the Chili Bowl ends, the result of endless laps turned by cars that sound like Flight of the Bumblebee played by Metallica in an echo chamber. And there are nearly 700 dump trucks worth of clay on the racetrack. On Sunday morning, I felt like I had aspirated 699 of them.
The Chili Bowl Flu is such a predictable staple of the experience that drivers have concocted ways to try to avoid it. Larson stuffs himself full of vitamins. Abreu takes vitamins, too, and washes his hands obsessively. Stenhouse drank so much DayQuil and NyQuil during the week that he joked the medicine should be one of his sponsors.
And all of that misery is part of the fun. Only with the Chili Bowl can the fact that attending it makes you sick be viewed as a marketing tool.
"It's virtually a party with a race," Yeley said. "Not the other way around."
Credit: NASCAR.com
