Pumping pistons music to NASCAR fans’ ears

Eric Leake

Monday, March 3, 2003 | 8:51 a.m.

When asked to explain the difference between watching NASCAR on TV and heading to the racetrack, Steve Garner had two words: "The noise."

"Like your head's on a railroad track and a freight train is coming at you," he said.

Only instead of freight trains, 43 snarling Winston Cup stock cars brought more than 140,000 fans to the the UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway Sunday.

They braved the traffic to pack grandstands at the most highly attended sporting event west of Texas for the sound and the feel of the race.

"I had to throw in some earplugs, but it's still awesome," Darrell Cole of Salt Lake City said.

The 34-year-old minor league baseball umpire was attending his first NASCAR event. He said being at the race was like nothing else.

"You're live. The experience -- you can't experience anything else like that," Cole said.

"When I was in the restroom, in these Port-A-Potties, the thing was shaking," he said, pointing to the green portable toilets in the field near Turn 2.

His girlfriend Margaret said she could even feel the 800-horsepower engines vibrating the ground.

She had the good sense to pick up some earplugs at the supermarket before leaving Utah, she said. Though she had not been to a stock car race before, she knew it would be loud.

Other fans were surprised by the noise. Manning a souvenir shop on the track concourse, Christina Iacoviello said unprepared fans found their way to the stand after the first lap to buy plugs for $3 a pair.

"People come up here and ask us with these loud voices because they're already almost deaf," she said.

Ryan Briggs, a young Jeff Gordon fan, watched the race from the infield grandstands. While the reverberating roar made some children cover their ears on the first pass, Ryan stood up and cheered.

"I shout, 'Jeff Gordon!' " said the Henderson boy, freckled and with grass stains on his knees. Ryan wore Day-Glo orange earplugs to block the "pretty loud" noise, he said.

At full throttle, stock cars can pump more than 130 decibels, sounding something like a buzzsaw cutting asphalt. Only firearms, jet engines and rocket launches are much louder.

"Almost everybody here wears hearing protection with any intelligence at all," said Bill Bass, a radio specialist from Ely. "A lot of people listen to rock and roll music. It's not much different than that."

Bass, 52, wore a headset scanner to protect his ears and to hear to race team communications.

"You can actually listen to the driver talking to the crew boss and his spotter," Bass said.

Watching through a chain link fence as the cars took a corner, Bass said the experience was like nothing else. Though loud, the sound is part of NASCAR, he said.

"It sounds like NASCAR. It's like nothing different," Bass said. "It's the sound of the track. Can't you feel it?"

The sound of the track has one more listener, the crews. Where others hear deafening roar, a good mechanic hears the harmony of a roaring four-barrel V-8 engine.

Brian Whitesell, Jeff Gordon's team manager, said when the sound is off, there could be something wrong underneath.

"The easiest thing is the engine. If it starts to miss, it starts being inconsistent and inharmonious," he said.