Tips For NHIS

09/07/06

            It’s that time of year again, when we make our annual fall trip to NHIS. Unlike the summer trip when the weather is usually sweltering hot and there is plenty to do, the fall trip is normally quite cool and I thought you might need some pointers as to how to keep yourself occupied in case the BES race is a blowout and Jeff Burton leads all 300 laps to win the Cup race.

Here are my top 10 things that you can do during the weekend at NHIS. This is written with camping and spending the whole weekend in mind, but if you are a ‘day tripper’ you can adjust accordingly and use only those suggestions that apply. These are all proven activities, but I denounce any and all responsibility in case you are arrested, beat up or otherwise injured.

#10. Mess with the parking attendant. Pull up to an obviously full parking lot. When the attendant tells you it’s full and there is no room for your car, tell him you parked your car in there earlier, it’s way down in the back and your using your brother’s car only to drive to the back of the lot and get your forgotten race ticket from your car. You’re in a hurry because the race is about to start. You’ll be surprised at how gullible these parking attendants can be! Once you convince him, drive in, park the car, lock it up and run by in a crowd of people to the track.

#9. Unless you are camped next to a group of porta-potties, find a place to sit or stand near them so you can see people going in and out. Go in one of them with a full, cold, newly opened beer and sit it on the seat beside the toilet. Watch until some drunk comes out drinking it, then laugh and point at him.

#8. Find the Nassholes bar. Just look for the sign. In camping lot ‘V’ at every race, is a bar built and maintained by a group of guys from Massachusetts that got sick of being called Massholes all the time and started referring to themselves as Nassholes to show that they are NASCAR fans and to hide the fact that they are from Massachusetts. They are a good, fun-loving group of guys that always have some good music playing and will set you up with a beer and help you find your way home if necessary.

#7. Move the cones. Go out onto the access road during a period when it isn’t too busy and move all of the hundreds of traffic cones that the security crew has put out there. Make a slalom course or just block a lane and then just sit back and watch traffic to see if anyone will follow them, move them or just drive over them. It pisses off the security guys but they’ll never know it was you.

#6. Try to gain access to an area that you aren’t supposed to be in. For anyone that doesn’t already have access to the infield, that is the perfect test. If you look as though you know what’s going on and can blend with a crowd and say something totally unintelligible, they might not even notice you don’t have the proper credentials. Once you’ve made it in, just be obnoxious until they tell you to leave.

#5. This requires getting away with #6. Once you are in the garage area, find an out of work driver, Ricky Craven, David Green, anyone without a ride and grab something that looks like a portable recorder. Proceed to do an interview, asking questions like “What’s it feel like to be out of work and have all of the team owners saying they aren’t able to fill their empty seats because there are no qualified drivers available?” You’ll get some strange looks, hurt some folk’s feelings and probably make an enemy, but the guys from network TV do it all the time and make money at it, so what the heck!

#4. If you are unlucky enough to have a rain delay or a race gets rained out after you are already in the grandstand area, try stealing one of the huge “Fresh Squeezed Lemonade” umbrellas and carrying it, over the heads of you and 3 or 4 of your friends back to your camper while singing in the rain. If you get caught, just act stupid and drunk. Remember, if you are stupid and drunk, you are loveable and no one will arrest you if you are lovable enough.

#3. Try sleeping during the race. If you are tired enough and have had enough to drink, you can sleep anywhere. I proved this by sleeping through about an hour of the Busch series night race at Bristol, if you can sleep at Bristol, you can sleep anywhere. A plus to this is that as long as you’re not obnoxious, sleeping through all that noise makes you loveable and no one will mess with you.

#2. Get a group of guys together and race those cute little homemade ‘cooler carts’ that every decent race fan brings to the track, down the hill on the paved access road. Try not to crash, the road rash will hurt. Also, you stand a pretty good chance of pissing off the security guys again, but they’ll have to catch up to you before they can do anything to you and then still will probably let you go with a warning if you are loveable enough.

#1. Enjoy yourself! That is what this is all about. If you can figure out when the Busch East race is running, (sometimes Friday, sometimes Saturday) go see it. While you are at the track anyway, watch the Whelen Modified tour race, (again, you’ll have to figure out when it is) go to the Cup series qualifying, it’s rather boring, but it isn’t terribly well attended so you can really spread out and get comfortable to watch it, making it the perfect time to practice your sleeping. If you’ve already bought the ticket for the BES or the WMT race (whichever one wound up being on Saturday) then you might as well go to the Craftsman Truck Series race. The CTS is the support division for the WMT or the BES (whichever one is on Saturday) and often produces the best racing of the weekend and is, undoubtedly, the division with vehicles which most closely resemble the vehicles we drive on the highway.

Whatever you do, don’t forget to have fun and to laugh at yourself and all of these other folks that are acting just as foolish as you are.

As always, send Questions, Comments, Hate Mail, and Indecent Proposals to, Fish c/o Busch North Scene or e-mail them to fishy@ctel.net