CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Less than 10 laps remained in the night race at Bristol Motor Speedway and Jonathan Fletcher was "nervous as crap."
The reason was simple: Joey Logano led the race while his teammate, Brad Keselowski, made a last-ditch effort to steal the win.
Fletcher, clad in a red Logano shirt and hat with scanner headphones atop his head, sat anxiously amid 200 fellow NASCAR fans watching the race at the half-mile track. As Keselowki made a desperate dive to Logano’s inside in turn four, Fletcher leaned all the way forward in his seat, bracing for the end.
Keselowki’s desperate bid failed and Logano won his third race of the year. Fletcher relaxed back in his seat and clapped.
Instead of attending the “last great coliseum,” located just over three hours away, Fletcher and the 200 fans inhabited a roughly 270 seat movie theater located at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in downtown Charlotte for a viewing party.
Saturday’s event was one of seven viewing parties the Hall of Fame will conduct this season, the last being for the season final race at Homestead on Nov. 16. The theater has played host to such parties since the Hall of Fame opened in 2010 under the guidance of Executive Director Winston Kelley.
“We’re looking to profile a unique viewing experience,” Kelley said in a phone interview. “Whether it’s their first visit or they’re a long time [Hall of Fame] member. Their purpose is to watch [races] in a unique format. Something you can’t do without paying online.”
Kelley, who splits his time between the Hall of Fame and his work as the Motor Racing Network’s lead pit road reporter, doesn’t get to go to every viewing event. But he was at the event held for the Truck series race at the Eldora dirt track in July.
“We had a little over 50 people,” Kelley said of the Wednesday night event. “I bet only two people got up [after the green flag dropped].”
Describing what the fans experience at the viewing parties as unique may be an understatement. The definition of unique in this instance is a giant movie screen with three separate projections. The center displays the live TV broadcast of the race, which goes commercial free for the entire length of the event. That’s neighbored by two in-car camera feeds that are only interrupted if the car in question is knocked out of the race.
The view of Saturday night's Bristol race for fans in attendance at the NASCAR Hall of Fame's viewing party
On this night, fans see sparks fly from the point of view of Kevin Harvick and Kyle Larson.
“This is way better than watching at home,” Fletcher said. “No commercials and we get to see what's happening the whole time, you get three different views and there's a lot of other people here to cheer with and boo with. It's wonderful.”
Include the use of a free scanner to listen to 30 drivers, the NASCAR officials channel and the Performance Racing Network radio broadcast and the chance to win prizes and, yes, it’s very unique.
In the lobby, fans are invited to submit votes for who they think will win the race into driver specific containers. On this night, the winner will receive a print of a painting titled “The return of the 3,” which shows Austin Dillon’s car mirrored by that of Dale Earnhardt Sr.
If a fan is also able to predict who leads the first lap and the half-way point, they will also win a leather Sterling Marlin jacket.
All of this is possible for a $10 entry fee.
Before the race starts, a group of four women walk noticeably as friends, but even more noticeably representing different driver allegiances. Their shirts broadcast support for Brad Keselowski, Kasey Kahne, Jamie McMurray and Clint Bowyer. The four settle in on the right side of the auditorium, two rows from the front.
The Keselowski fan, Rene, a veteran of multiple viewing parties, is tuned into her complementary scanner and updates her companions on the night’s events, beginning with driver introductions.
You can take the fans out of the race track, but you can’t take the race track out of the fans. When the invocation and the National Anthem take place, all but a few fans rise to their feet to take part in the prerace ritual.
Fans at the viewing party stand for the National Anthem and invocation
Matt Aldrich, the Hall’s director of membership, took time to address the crowd, asking who the fans think will win the night’s race. “I think I heard Dale Jr. the loudest,” Aldrich said jokingly.
Aldrich also makes sure to note to the parents in the room about the scanners. “The language that comes over there … is real.”
Aldrich, whose grandfather once raced on Long Island, then asks which fans traveled the farthest for this night in the epicenter of NASCAR country.
“Vermont!”
“Iowa!”
“Hamden, Connecticut!”
“Missouri!”
The shout out from Connecticut belonged to Laura Santino. Santino, 43, is a paralegal by trade. In tow is her husband, Anthony, who owns his own IT consulting company. “Not your typical NASCAR people,” Laura said with a laugh.
How bad did Santino want to visit the Hall of Fame and everything that goes with it? “We're here for the American Legion Auxiliary Convention,” Laura said. “We came early so I could add this to the trip. That's how bad.”
Santino, who grew up a Cale Yarborough and Dale Earnhardt Sr. fan, is also accompanied by a new friend in a woman named Marilyn and her son Jess. The two met the previous day while on the tour of the Hall of Fame when Laura complimented Marilyn on her purse.
“[We] had a wild and crazy time, so we're just continuing,” Marilyn said. Marilyn and Jess were visiting from Warsaw, Ohio, a town of roughly 670 people, for the latter’s 30th birthday.
Marilyn is a stay at home mom, taking care of Jess who is a “special needs child.” Jess latched onto auto racing while watching on TV from his “pumpkin seat” as a kid, when the movement of the cars racing captivated him.
“We've never been to a [NASCAR race] apart from some dirt track races when I was a kid in Ohio,” Marilyn said. “[Jess] doesn't do the heat well. So it's better that we do this!”
Kelley believes the viewing parties can be a place for fans to connect and even introduce news fans to the sport.
“It’s become almost a family atmosphere,” Kelley said, describing people taking the time to catch up with each other and even make new friends.
The poster available to be won by a fan Saturday night at the NASCAR Hall of Fame
The best example of this is the Young family, a group of four headed by patriarch Brent. Accompanying him are his wife and Kyle Busch fan (“I like his attitude”) Melissa and their two kids, Madeline, 10, and Mason, 8.
The family hails from Las Vegas and Washington state and are relative newcomers to the sport. But they’re not so new that Brent doesn’t proudly sport a Jimmie Johnson hat and a Hall of Fame backpack while Melissa has No. 18 decals on her car, which embarrasses Brent when he drives it and draws the occasional flipped bird on the highway.
“If (NASCAR) were here in Charlotte, would we choose here over going to the track? That would be a tough one,” Brent said. “We would still want to go out to the track, but certainly for night races, it’s nice here. Kids get a little sleepy and it can take forever to get out of the track.”
The family is no stranger to the real deal, having attended the spring race at Bristol in person. “[The viewing parties] don’t necessarily hit all of the same feelings of watching a race with 100,000 people versus watching in a small group setting,” Brent said. “This is like making your living room 10 times bigger.”
Even so, Mason, wearing a Star Wars t-shirt, says he’d take the in-person experience, because it’s “more up close and it’s louder.”
There are no plans to add more viewing parties between now and the finale at Homestead, but Kelley thinks seven times a year is the right amount after the first few years were spent gaging interest level.
“If you do something too much, it’s no longer special,” Kelley said. “Here’s the right cadence.”
It was also the right cadence Saturday night for Fletecher, who had attended the Nationwide race in person the night before. Fletcher knows where his loyalties lie and expresses them when Busch is involved in a wreck on lap 126, throwing his arms up in celebration (“He's a cry baby.”).
Fletcher had expected things to fall in favor of Matt Kenseth, but after 500 laps, it was Logano who came away with a win and Fletcher who would walk away with the poster.
“I'm glad I put my name in Joey's cup tonight,” Fletcher said. “That was awesome.”