Hey, It Is Southern California

FONTANA — Sitting high above the first turn at California Speedway. In an injured pink lawn chair. Atop a teetering motor home that is swaying 183.015 mph.

Trying to learn, just who are these people who have invaded Southern California this weekend for “The Human Billboard and Funny Accent Show” that is stock car racing?

Who are these folks who will sell out our new 71,000-seat raceway, fill up this huge infield with recreational vehicles, pay $20 for caps emblazoned with the name of laundry detergents?

Found some Southern Californians who could surely explain these outsiders, sensible folks from Camarillo. Climbed to the top of their wrinkled motor home with the promise not to sue if I crash into the kitchen.

Prepare to ask about the foreigners when the air is pierced with the most incredible noise, a toe-tingling sound, just as a light green car rumbles along the track.

Turn to face the car, then realize the noise is coming from the other side, from the top of the trailer.

From one of these nice people from Camarillo, an 8-year-old named Brittany.

“Yeeeeehaaaaw!” screams the Southern California girl, pointing to the track, dancing on the aluminum, “It’s Bobbbbby Labonteeeee!”

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Rednecks? Hicks?

How about neighbors.

Those who have taken great delight in poking fun at the crowd that will attend this area’s first major stock car race since 1988 would do well to spend an afternoon in this foreign, forsaken desert.

These are not foreign, forsaken people.

They live here.

They are pipeline equipment workers from Chino. Electricians from Yorba Linda. Steel processing workers from Corona.

They weren’t bussed in from Talladega, Ala., they drove in from the San Fernando Valley.

“Southern California rednecks,” said Tony Arnold, a mechanic from Fountain Valley.

And proud of it.

Since Riverside International Raceway closed, thousands of them have been forced into hiding, emerging only for an annual trip to Phoenix, getting their weekly fix on Sunday afternoons on ESPN.

“And when I worked, my boyfriend would tape it,” explained Shelley Sales, a Camarillo waitress.

But now they are back, louder than ever, having bought tickets last winter for this weekend, filling the infield with California license plates, filling nearby roads with trademark bumper stickers.

“A Bad Day Hunting Is Better Than A Good Day Working.”

“Brakes Are For Wimps.”

And Southern California is still bigger than anyone can imagine.

If this weekend illustrates nothing else, it will be that.

The fans who crowded the speedway Friday were the sort you would expect to find in Rockingham, not Redondo.

They sat for hours on motor homes or hot benches simply to watch sheet metal advertisements speed around the track, one by one.

They hooted and howled at a race where it appeared that nobody was racing.

Then they retired to Chintz Row, the area behind the stands where $20 could buy a Dale Earnhardt camouflage cap, a Robby Gordon used tire, or a T-shirt that read: “I live with fear every day. Sometimes she lets me race.”

For the more sophisticated fans--or at least those with $65 to blow--there are scanners that can pick up conversations between pit crews and drivers.

A saleswoman was asked, “Can’t opposing teams buy those same scanners?”

She said, “They do. They all cheat on each other. So what you hear on the scanner may be just the opposite of what they are doing.”

Before she could be asked why anybody would rent them, she excused herself to attend to a lengthening line of people who would.

This newspaper even caught the spirit when a salesman sold Friday’s editions while wearing a huge cardboard checkered flag out of the back of his cap.

Then there were the cigarettes. At what other sporting event can you get free cigarettes?

“But only for smokers,” said the publicity woman, apparently smarting from an earlier agreement between the government and tobacco companies that could knock Winston out of this game entirely.

Yet, this was still California, not North Carolina.

Of three men sitting in the back of a Ford Explorer in an outer parking lot, drinking beer before Friday’s qualifying, one was from Corona and another from Yorba Linda.

“At this NASCAR tailgate party, we’re having a seven-course meal,” said Gene Harsma, who works in a steel processing company in Corona. “A six-pack and a sandwich. We consider it a badge of honor to be a redneck.”

In the infield, underneath the awning of a 1972 motor home, Long Beach mom Terry Foster smiled.

She would sleep that night on foam egg crates. She would wear her Jeff Gordon shirt on race day. She would tell new friends about the wonderful black chrome Earnhardt-autographed wrench set that her son has amid his roomful of NASCAR souvenirs.

“Californians have been waiting a long time for this,” she said.

Durn right.