A few weeks ago, I buttoned up two parts of a trip to Northern California that included a visit to Flowmaster’s West Sacramento factory and a trip to Calistoga Speedway’s half-mile dirt oval for the Kings of the West Series sprint car races. That trip also included a visit at Flowmaster’s behest to Sonoma Raceway for NASCAR Sprint Cup’s Toyota Save Mart 350, one of the two road course races on the Sprint Cup schedule. It was an interesting experience, for sure, and one that I’ve done my best to encapsulate for you after the jump. [Disclaimer: Flowmaster provided travel arrangements and accommodations for this visit.] NASCAR in California’s Wine Country, I’m told, is vastly different from what you’ll find at Daytona or Charlotte. Nevertheless, within minutes of arriving Saturday for qualifying, I was confronted with what is apparently A Thing at NASCAR races: Grown men who dress like Richard Petty. This Petty dress-alike (who actually looks more like my dad) was only marginally taller than me (I’m short-feet tall) so I figured out pretty quickly that it wasn’t The King. Even with the shades on, this impersonator took obvious enjoyment from the fleeting “Is that…?” looks of passersby. Not a faker: Top Gear host Rutledge Wood also rushed by, pausing briefly to say hello to Hooniverse Podcast co-host Blake Z. Rong briefly before rushing off to drive the pacecar for Saturday afternoon’s NASCAR K&N Pro West Series support race. I arrived just in time for qualifying. The garage access I’d been handed meant a close-up view of the cars lined up before qualifying. Drivers’ attitudes varied. For example, David Mayhew lingered about looking a bit nervous. The California-based driver was in fact only qualifying the #44 car for J.J. Yeley, who was racing a Nationwide Series car 2,000 miles away at Road America (in what turned out to be the first NASCAR race in the rain, maybe ever) and then hitching a plane to the Bay Area immediately after the race. While Mayhew took notes from his engineer before qualifying, six-time Sprint Car champion Jimmie Johnson seemed less concerned about it, wandering among the parked cars, grinning and giving the usual faces some good-natured ribbing. Just a couple minutes before qualifying he trudged back to his car while most of the field were already donning their helmets and sliding through the windows into the driver seats. The moment that qualifying begins, crews push each of the cars backward onto pitlane, where a chorus of burbling V8s roar to life almost in unison. The drivers dip the throttles and dump the clutches, the cars soon scrambling in utter chaos to find a spot in the two-wide, 43-car scrum simply to exit the pits and begin qualifying. Within a couple minutes, drivers had tried their best to leave enough gap ahead to get a clean qualifying run around Sonoma Raceway’s two-mile configuration for NASCAR (which sadly bypasses the Carousel and the long run down the drag strip). From the grandstand, the V8 roar sound pleasing but not overwhelmingly loud. In the background of the shot above, you can see the infield’s “Souvenir Row,” massive merchandise trailers that allow fans to purchase officially licensed clothing or rent a headset pre-programmed with team radio channels and race control. The NASCAR merchandise machine is ever-present, although the massive territory of the road course meant the lines were somewhat smaller than they likely would have been at an oval race. Sonoma Raceway is built on a hillside, climbing up sharply  from Turn 1 up to Turn 2 on the hill, a sectiong that  provides plenty of excitement. The long left-hand climb transitions sharply to the right-hand Turn 2, which requires heavy braking during the transition. The best Sprint Cup road racers made it look easy, but just about everyqualifying  lap saw at least one driver locking up the brakes or fighting the wheel as the car tried to swap ends mid-braking zone. Joey Logano looked comfortable on a road course. I got the chance to speak with Logano very briefly after qualifying (before his PR person whisked him away to another set of interviews), and he suggested that the level of talent in NASCAR is far better balanced than in the past so there are fewer “road course ringers.” He had done some testing at Road Atlanta with his Team Penske Ford and, like many Sprint Cup drivers, felt at home turning right. Also worth noting: Logano’s garage includes a 1937 GMC Pickup rat rod, a 1959 Cadillac, a 1972 three-door Suburban, and an American Speed Association stock car that he is making street legal. After qualifying, most drivers skedaddle immediately for media interviews and meet-ups with sponsors. Some teams have their crews push the car back to the garages while others entrust a crew member to slow-ride their whips back. That right there? It’s not actually Landon Cassill. Crews set to work immediately, making adjustments and tuning the cars for the next day’s warmup and then race. I actually have no idea what adjustments were being made, but everyone looked really busy, which is what really matters in racing. As you might guess, a team goes through a whole lot of tires in a given weekend. Tire are marked and then inflated to a standard pressure. Fine tuning for performance adjustments can be made mid-race by adding or subtracting pressure to the tires, but teams start with them at a baseline pressure. I didn’t stick around for the K&N Series race, which young Sprint Cup superstar Kyle Larson won, as I was headed to Calistoga right after qualifying. However, as I was leaving, TV commentator and former NASCAR driver Wally Dallenbach Jr. was heading out to drive a camera car for TNT’s track preview to be used at the top of the race broadcast. Sunday brought a not-entirely-unreasonable amount of road traffic to the track’s vicinity, but I soon found myself in the paddock. Right at the entrance to the garage area, several cars were getting last-minute tech inspections before the race. Josh Wise’s Dogecoin-sponsored car was one of the more popular low-budget teams. Very scrutineering. Tomy Drissi might be the closest thing to a road-course ringer in the field, having won an SCCA Trans Am championship and raced in the American Le Mans Series for several years. Drissi’s Hercules livery was certainly eye-catching, even though he started last on the grid in his Toyota and lacked pace during the actual race. One thing car-tech nerds may notice: The rear quarter windows on these cars feature differing numbers of NACA ducts running air to assorted brakes and coolers. Road racing is unusually hard on transmissions, since most races find the cars running through the gears only to get up to fourth gear for the high speeds of ovals. At Sonoma, two or three laps will see as many shifts as entire oval races. While I waited in line to grab a hearty burger cooked on an open grill, the Patriots Jets Team kicked off The Show that is a NASCAR race with a smoke-trailing aerobatic demonstration in their Aero L-39 Albatross jets. Our seats were on the backside of the track on the concrete bleachers that line the back straight, which give a good view of how the track snakes up the hillside and then back down. The substantial prerace ceremonies began as I sat down and they included much fanfare and celebration of all things nationally proud, perhaps exemplified best by a semi-tractor flying two massive American flags as fireworks explode overhead. This was followed shortly by a Small-Block Chevy-powered shopping cart flying its own flag as well as that of the race sponsor, Save Mart. The safety crews took a lap around the track with the lead Toyota Tundras sporting T-shirt-cannon-wielding promoters (Note the throngs of fans clamoring for a shirt). The tow vehicles and track sweepers are coming down the esses, which would soon prove to be one of the more entertaining places to watch a stream of stock cars flying over the tall curbing. As is apparently the new tradition in motorsport, a foursome of T-6 and SNJ trainers from World War II buzzed overhead after the national anthem, their Wasp radial engines reverberating sweetly off the hill. The command to start engines followed shortly and the burbling V8s roared to life, echoing off the hill. As it turns out, my seat seemed considerably louder than the grandstand, likely because the sound radiated off the hill and back across the track. The first parade lap was a long crocodile, but the cars soon paired off in the starting order, prompting cheers and pumped fists as they streamed by at idle just before the start. The green flag soon waved high on polesitter Jamie McMurray and 43 massive V8s turned the parched wine country hillside into a reverberating cacophony. The first run through the downhill esses found drivers pitching their 3,400-pound beasts in frighteningly nimble fashion just inches from each other. The cars largely ran smooth through the section in front of me with the occasional leaning and bumping. After about 40 minutes, the race settled into a rhythm with drivers trying to just keep their cars intact to ensure they had something left later in the race. As I had been gifted access to the Hot Pit (albeit on the cold side of the pit wall) during the race, I headed there, where things got interesting. As it turns out, you find LeMons drivers everywhere. I ran into this chap from the F-U Haul/Team Mayhem Mazda RX-7 team, who had skipped the scorching LeMons race that weekend at Buttonwillow Raceway. Once in the pits, I noticed an abundance of little details (some relevant, some not so much). This team’s equipment cart held duct tape in several colors on two shelves with some wicked speed holes drilled in them. When you need duct tape in big-dollar racing, I guess you need it fast. It was impossible to hear the public address system from the hot pit unless you rented a headset (I didn’t) so I lost track of the race a bit, but as the cars strung out across Sonoma’s two miles, a car ripped by pitlane on the front straight every few seconds at full song. The standings suddenly seemed less important and it was enough to simply appreciate these beastly road racers. Local hero Kyle Larson clearly had a lot of friends around. Here’s Larson’s pitstop about halfway through the race. You may notice the long yellow booms hanging over the pit box on the hot side of the pit wall. I’d always thought those were something to do with the fuel system or the air guns, but they’re not. They are high-definition video cameras. After the stop, crew members saunter to the back of the pit cart, where they meet with the crew chief to watch replays of the last stop several times at different speeds. Many of the tire changers and jackmen are former college athletes, so this reviewing of video is familiar, as is the teamwork that was evident among the crews. After reviewing the video, crews set to work immediately for the next stop. Tire changers glue the lugnuts to the wheel to ease tire changing, also carrying extra lugnuts on their belts (or somewhere else within reach) in case one falls off. Tire men also go over their air guns between stops, checking them and oiling them to make sure they’ll work. Every tenth of a second matters when racing off pitlane and equipment failures can, simply put, lose races. You can see glued lugnuts on the wheels and also tires that are clearly labeled in ways I understand (“RR” is a right-rear tire) and ways I don’t (orange or white tape). Crew also burn off the beaded-up tires that come off the car during a stop. A blowtorch and putty knife gives a clean look at the rubber. The crewman measures the wear and marks it on the tire. They then discuss that with the crew chief and the tire representative(s). After the replays are done and the pit prepared for the next stop, the crew take a break until they’re called upon again, though they seldom stray far in case a stop is needed on short notice. After the race’s final stop, a few tires are prepared in case of emergency, but most of the crew patiently sit and wait for the checkered flag. While 43 cars isn’t quite the 180 that LeMons packs onto Sonoma Raceway, the drivers lean on each other and bang body panels all day. Smaller bodywork knocks can be fixed with big patches of really awesome duct tape called BearBond or sometimes just left alone with body panels or broken missing like some kind of Death Race 2000 car (though this seems to be a practice typically reserved only for road courses, where aerodynamics aren’t quite as important as on a big oval). As it turns out, the bodywork on NASCAR is simply a part in a catalog. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense, but it was something I’d never before considered. Being that the panels are carbon fiber, this is an expensive wagon fullof used-to-be-racecar. With the race’s end approaching, some teams start to pack up non-essential items and carts to return to the haulers. This allows teams to make a quick exit, which is important when the next load-in day for a race weekend is thousands of miles and only five days away. With about 30 laps remaining, I walked to the end of pitlane, right where cars flat-foot it through Turn 12 back to the start/finish line. On a whim, I tried to shoot a few panning shots as cars whisked into view at more than 100 miles per hour. The second car I tried to shoot was Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who was completely sideways by himself as he flashed around the media center that sits at Turn 12’s apex. Stenhouse may have barely touched the wall, but he continued on without causing further incident, though the tiresmoke lingered over the front straight for a minute or two. Stenhouse hobbled around the track and dove right into his pitbox, where the crew patched up some bodywork and removed the tires. One had completedly disintegrated and the ones that hadn’t come apart bore huge, ugly bubbles on them from overheating. Whether the cause or result of the spin, the tires were totally used up. I opted to watch the race’s closing few laps from the bridge over the steep climb from Turn 1 up to the hard-right Turn 2. Carl Edwards managed a win with his Roush Ford, his first Sprint Cup victory on a road course (though he had three Nationwide wins at three different road courses: Road America, Watkins Glen, and Circuit Gilles Villeneuve). He had to hold off Jeff Gordon, multiple winner at Sonoma, but Edwards was first across the stripe on Lap 110. With some help from Flowmaster (who pay contingency money if cars with their logo win races), I managed to find myself in Victory Lane for the celebration. The photo above captures the pageantry of winner celebrations with everyone in the photo donning the correct sponsor hat for the official photo opportunities. It’s all carefully orchestrated with TV and with public relations people in an incredibly efficient display that makes even the best wedding photographers look like amateurs. Also of note: Every body panel on the car displays wrinkles from where Edwards gave and received bumps throughout 350 miles. The confetti explodes out of the confetti cannon on cue as Edwards hoists his trophy overhead. Even with the efficiency of photo ops, the pomp and circumstance lasts a solid 15 minutes and the champagne spraying bordered on vindictive with crew who had been handed the bottle blasting each other in the face with the bubbly. At the day’s end, one of the crew snuck off with the winner’s bottle (branded, of course, as NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Winner – Sonoma champagne) for a spot in his trophy case or atop his mantel. In similar fashion, I snuck out of the paddock and back to the world, which suddenly seemed impossibly quiet. [All photos copyright 2014 Hooniverse/Eric Rood]