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At dawn on a hazy autumn morning, the rising sun spilled over the steel grandstands of the Talladega Superspeedway like foam from a cracked can of Bud. This image likely came to mind because I was lying beneath a tarp in a scrubby Alabama meadow carpeted with empty beer cans—an area known as Talladega’s Family Parking Field C. The 2.66-mile Talladega racetrack, located about 50 miles east of Birmingham, is the world’s second-largest car-racing venue, with a mile-long grandstand built to accommodate more than 140,000 fans. Around my A-frame L.L. Bean tent were some 40,000 parked vehicles, most of them flatbeds, SUVs, Winnebagos, and camper vans filled with groggy pilgrims rising to greet a day that would bring them the nation’s biggest semiannual NASCAR racing event.

The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing holds “17 of the top 20 most-attended U.S. sporting events,” according to its Web site, and its races are widely referred to as the nation’s most popular spectator sport. This was my first visit to a NASCAR event, and I had come to see what may rank among the world’s most lavish displays of fuel consumption: forty hot rods, each getting about 5 miles per gallon, hurtling around a strip of asphalt in an infinite loop. I admit I came to the event with a certain lack of regard for its premise: burning huge amounts of fuel and rubber for the sole purpose of driving around in circles. The ritual seemed careless to me at a time of war in the Middle East, unchecked global warming, and soaring energy prices. But hours later I would leave Talladega with a less skeptical take on the NASCAR phenomenon and a better understanding not just of carburetors and checkered flags, but of who we are as a nation—a thrill-seeking, speed-loving, self-propelled, forward-charging culture.

Talladega is NASCAR’s XXL, Big Gulp–sized speedway—the most treacherous and most exciting. Its long straightaways and unusually wide track allow for cars to build up to and sustain speeds of more than 200 mph and to run three or four abreast. Racers don’t brake for turns at Talladega the way they do at smaller tracks; instead they mash their gas pedals to the floor. These conditions raise fans’ expectations for the “big one”—a massive, harrowing multicar wreck.

Field C, which a week earlier had housed only wildflowers and Alabama Longleaf pines, was now a sprawling tribal village with makeshift neighborhoods and orderly avenues webbed throughout the settlement. Families had been dwelling there for days before the race, many erecting well-appointed encampments with awnings trimmed in Christmas lights, lawn chairs, picnic tables, movie projectors, outdoor grills, and coolers stocked with cold American beer. Hoisted above the camps were Confederate flags and tributes to the denizens’ favorite racers, above all Dale Earnhardt Jr., #8. “Junior” (who has since changed to #88) is the son of the legendary NASCAR champion who lost his life in the last turn of the 2001 Daytona 500. The drivers were competing on this fall day in a 500-mile race that was part of “the Chase” (the ten-race playoffs) for the Sprint Cup, the top prize in racing.

I had awoken to the ambient stench of beer-soaked crabgrass, cigarette butts, fire pits, and the charbroiled remains of the previous night’s cookouts. I groped for soap and toothpaste and made my way to a public trailer marked “$5 Showers.” En route, I caught sight of my neighbor shuffling out of his tent wearing nothing but his briefs. He nodded hello, and as he leaned over a propane stove to flip his pancakes, I saw the numeral 8 shaven expertly into his thicket of back hair. This tribute to Junior was a single-digit poem about America’s devotion to speed—a display of fan loyalty so brash, intimate, and wholehearted that I stopped in my tracks, feeling awed and strangely jejune. I’d never been a sports fan of even mild convictions, let alone known loyalty so absolute. And though I’ve done my fair share of gas guzzling—including driving ATVs (four-wheel off-road motorcycles) in the backwoods of Maine throughout my childhood—I can’t say I’ve been a real aficionado of horsepower, either.

The world of stock cars was new territory for me. But not for a large percentage of our population. NASCAR claims 75 million fans. During the nine months of the racing season, it’s second only to football as the most-viewed professional sport on TV. It broadcasts its races in more than 100 countries, and has speedways in Mexico and Canada. But by no means does it have an international ethos—NASCAR is as much an American export as are blue jeans, Coca-Cola, and cherry pie. The sport grew out of the 1930s Prohibition era in America’s Deep South, when rural bootleggers rigged standard-looking cars with high-powered engines to outrun the law. The forefathers of NASCAR, wrote historian Neal Thompson, were “a bunch of motherless, dirt-poor southern teens driving with the devil in jacked-up Fords full of corn whiskey—the best means of escape a southern boy could wish for.”

Fans still cling to this unabashedly roughneck image. NASCAR’s feisty southern outlaw spirit was on full display at Talladega. Many in the overwhelmingly white crowd wore T-shirts and baseball caps featuring Confederate flags. “Redneck by Choice, Southern by the Grace of God” went the refrain on one such garment. “If You Don’t Like My Flag, You Can Kiss My Rebel Ass” went another. The sport’s macho undercurrent was also supersized at Talladega: while there were plenty of women in attendance, most of them seemed unfazed by the hand-scrawled signs reading “Show Us Your Tits.” (For that matter, one twentysomething in my vicinity was happy to comply.)

The atmosphere was festive and—setting aside considerations of gender and racial demographics—even good-natured. Talladega had the carnival air you might find at a county fair, only a thousand times bigger. Concession booths with all-American delicacies were nearly as prevalent as the fans themselves—you couldn’t spit without hitting a purveyor of beer, corn dogs, fried chicken, or funnel cakes. (The speedway’s Web site notes that “12,000 pounds of Ballpark Franks are sold by concessions during a race weekend at Talladega, which when laid end-to-end, would circle the entire 2.66-mile track 1.14 times.”) After my $5 shower, pumped from a water tank by a purring diesel generator, I grabbed a double cheeseburger and followed the jostling crowd toward the track.