NASCAR racing, once considered no more than a regional circuit of moonshiners pounding around low-country dirt tracks in a cloud of red dust and cliché, has somehow become the fastest-growing spectator sport in America — and the buxom, bumpkin darling of Madison Avenue. With 75 million fans and its popularity soaring in every corner of the country, NASCAR is a 200-mile-an-hour traveling tent-and-revival show, a platinum-plated, multibillion-dollar V-8 hero machine — a sports entertainment empire built at the very crossroads of pop culture, corporate commerce, and American mythology.

Smart, funny, and profane, Sunday Moneyis the kaleidoscopic account of an entire season on the NASCAR circuit. Driving 48,000 miles in a tiny motorhome, writer Jeff MacGregor and his wife, an award-winning photographer, covered 36 races at 23 tracks in 18 states, from Daytona to Darlington, New Hampshire to California, from the Wal-Mart to the Waldorf, profiling the lives of superstar drivers like Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart, their crews, and their fans, across the grinding reach of a 40-week season.

But this is not just a behind-the-scenes chronicle of America's loudest pastime. It is the story of a hundred stories; of red states and blue, of splendid Rebel lizards and golden Yankee hotshoes, of mystic true believers and their holy roll of honored ghosts. In the tradition of On the Road, Travels with Charley, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Sunday Moneyis a snapshot of American culture — of race, religion, class, sex, money, politics, and fame — taken from the window of a moving car, a brilliantly observed, keenly rendered, and darkly comic portrait of America.

"Starting at the beginning of the 2001 NASCAR season, Sports Illustrated contributor MacGregor and his photographer wife attended almost every race on the circuit in an attempt to understand the sport's wild appeal. The author's hopped-up reporting of the races, the fans and the history bolsters his admiration of the drivers and their skills. Traveling across the country, making pit stops in Wal-Mart parking lots, MacGregor becomes one with the throngs who worship weekly at the altars of speed and death in places like Richmond, Va.; Bristol, Tenn.; and Rockingham, N.C. As he reports the highlights of each race — who won, who wrecked, which racer had the sexiest women in his company, which fans were the wackiest — he neatly weaves the history of the sport into his story to measure the distance racing has traveled from its days on dirt tracks with unregulated stock cars to mammoth stadiums and corporate sponsorships. Through interviews with driver Jeff Gordon and others, MacGregor demystifies these celebrities' aura — they're ordinary folks — while at the same time proving that the glitter of being a winning NASCAR driver has propelled Gordon and others into a regal realm far above their fans' station. 8 pages of color photos not seen by PW. Agent, Heather Schroder. (May)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Jeff MacGregor is a special contributor to Sports Illustrated magazine and a six-time National Magazine Award nominee, whose work has been widely anthologized. He writes frequently for the New York Times, and his fiction has appeared in Story and Esquire. This is his first book.