DATE: Monday, May 19, 1997                  TAG: 9705190152

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C6   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: CONCORD, N.C.                     LENGTH:   76 lines

LIGHTS, CAMERAS, AND ACTION, TOO NASCAR'S PRIME-TIME SPECTACULAR IS FUELED BY SHEER PSYCHIC ENERGY ON AND OFF THE TRACK.

In the moments before The Winston Select all-star race at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Saturday night, the atmosphere was so electric it seemed almost a shame to break it up for the race.

The 70-lap contest that followed on this perfect May night started with a bang but fizzled to an anticlimactic finish in which Jeff Gordon displayed yet again that he is the best of the best.

But in the 20 minutes before the race, as the drivers were introduced to the crowd and the crew members pushed the cars out to the finish line, well, you simply had to be there to fully appreciate the experience.

The raw energy of more than 100,000 raucous fans, compounded by the countless tiny piercing flashes of their cameras, flowed out of those gigantic grandstands and washed over the competitors.

The effect on drivers and crewmen varied. It made some edgy. Others basked in the atmosphere. Here and there, a crewman checked tire pressures or double-checked the final prerace checklist. Some crews were quiet; others chatty.

Standing in the grass of the tri-oval, a few feet from Mark Martin's Ford Thunderbird, was its owner, the intense and competitive Jack Roush. He was as calm as you'll ever see Jack Roush. There was almost a dreamy look in his eyes.

Roush is an engineer's engineer, logical and analytical and serious, but he allows himself to smell the roses when he has a spare moment and now he was doing just that - soaking up the sheer psychic energy of this massive tribal gathering of race fanatics.

``One of the most exciting things is night racing,'' Roush said. ``It's dirt-track racing and the dirt boiling up through the lights. It's the flames pouring out of the headers at a drag race, creating such a fabulous effect at night.''

``At that first Winston at night (in 1992), when the cars came around on that first lap and all of those flashbulbs - that sea of light that came out from all of those people in the grandstands - all but stopped my heart.

``That amount of human energy that was generated at that moment from all of those people all at once was amazing. It was a wave of light, a wave of brilliant light. It was spectacular.''

The most important element of The Winston Select is that it pays no championship points. Thus, for one glorious night a year, the drivers can shed inhibitions born of the all-consuming Winston Cup points race and let it all hang out.

So the fans know they're going to see a normally conservative driver like Terry Labonte foolishly go three-wide into the third turn. Nearly everyone drives like Junior Johnson used to - with reckless abandon. The anticipation of this is what whips the crowd into a frenzy.

Roush looked up into the grandstands. People were lined three deep against a restraining fence, shouting to their favorite drivers, trying to make their individual voices heard above the general din of the multitude.

``There's a level of human experience here that goes beyond the normal senses,'' he said. ``It's beyond sight. It's beyond feel. It's beyond touch. It's beyond sound. It's human emotion that prevails.

``I've always thought that if you brought a person here who couldn't see and couldn't hear, they would still feel it and still share in it and be a part of this. It's beyond the normal bounds. It's racing at another level.''

It is the atmosphere of the Masters on Sunday afternoon, or opening ceremonies at the Olympics, or an NFC Conference championship game at RFK Stadium in the glory days of the Redskins.

But Charlotte Motor Speedway is so huge, there are whole grandstands with thousands of roaring fans that are simply too far from the finish line to be heard. But you could turn and see them, and see the movement caused by their cheering, and know that they, too, were a part of it.

``It's amazing,'' said Kyle Petty as he stood next to his car with his wife, Patti, at his side. ``Where do all of these people come from, and what are they thinking? You gotta remember, I was comin' to these places when nobody was here.''

And as Petty reflected on where NASCAR had come from, it just as easy to wonder where the sport of stock car racing fits into the American experience at this moment, and where it all might be headed.

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