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I want to have Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s baby.

These are feelings that I wasn’t expecting. Growing up watching stock-car racing in North Carolina, I never felt that way about Buddy or Cale or Richard or Benny. But there is just something about Junior. The close-set eyes, those thin lips, the yam-orange hair. That boy is hot.

In case you are just tuning in, Dale Earnhardt Jr.--Little E, Dale Jr. or just Junior--is the biggest star in NASCAR racing, which in a few decades has grown from dirt-track roots in the South to a multibillion-dollar sports empire, jumping the cultural fire-line to mainstream America. NASCAR is now second only to professional football in TV viewership, and much of the new audience is suburban, professional and educated. There are now Boston commodities traders debating the intricacies of aero-push and weight-jacking over their kale salads.

The fastest-growing segment of NASCAR viewers? Young women. More than 40% of those who identify themselves as fans are female.

This upswing in female interest may be the result of a formerly untapped love of motor sports--thoughts, gentlemen?--or it could be related to the, um, packaging of young hottie drivers in naughty-tight fire suits, guys such as Carl Edwards, Jamie McMurray and Kasey Kahne. NASCAR-themed commercials now invariably include imagery of the drivers walking in dreamy slow motion, with stern yet seductive expressions, America’s next flame-retardant supermodels.

Have a favorite? You can go to the Fox Sports website and vote for “NASCAR’s Sexiest Driver.” I’ll wait here.

When I started following NASCAR in the late 1960s, the smiles were not so dazzling, nor nearly so complete. Most of the drivers were hard, middle-aged men, sunburned knuckle-busters in white socks. These drivers were many things, but pretty wasn’t one of them. The sponsors sold tires and oil and tobacco, beer for the night and coffee for the rheumy-lidded morning.

By executive order of the France family--the Daytona Beach dynasty that runs the show--NASCAR was essentially a sex-free zone. No scantily clad trophy girls, no heaving cheerleaders, nothing inconsistent with Bible Belt “family entertainment.” Even when driver Alan Kulwicki had Hooters sponsorship, the Hooters girls were not allowed to flounce around at the track. The closest NASCAR came to titillation was the laughably chaste Miss Winston, an “ambassador” of the sport who stayed as covered up as a Jehovah’s Witness.

Just a decade ago, the sport’s traditional audience--largely Southern and blue collar--regarded any display of male glamour with suspicion and contempt. Jeff Gordon was everything Madison Avenue could have wanted in a driver: well-spoken and polite, openly religious (he married a Scripture-quoting Miss Winston named Brooke Sealey) and fantastically talented. The multiple Winston Cup champion was the ultimate “Thank-God-and-Goodyear” driver. And he was handsome enough to be voted one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People.”

Which to many meant only one thing: He was gay. For years, when Gordon was introduced before races, boos rained down on him and meatheads in the grandstands would hold up signs: “Fans Against Gordon.” F.A.G. Gordon holds the record as the most gay-bashed straight man in America.

If Gordon represented the sport’s selling out to corporate America--which equated in some alchemical fashion to its feminization--his greater sin was beating seven-time champion Dale Earnhardt Sr., the sport’s biggest star, the charismatic antihero in the mirror shades and black car.

The irony is that after Earnhardt Sr. died at Daytona in 2001, Junior--the Gen-Y heir apparent of Earnhardt’s army--became much more of a corporate tool than Gordon ever was. Surely some essential fabric was ripped when Junior appeared as a male model in print ads for Drakkar Noir cologne and in commercials for Wrangler jeans.

Meanwhile, Junior has casually, even insolently, defied the unwritten rules of driver behavior--and good for him. He put Daytona Beach on notice early in a notorious, profanity-laced Playboy interview in 2001, in which he confessed to smoking weed, eating magic mushrooms and drinking indecorous amounts of beer. Last year he was a celebrity photographer at a Playboy pictorial of the Dahm triplets. At least no one accuses him of being gay.

I’m sure the folks in Daytona Beach would like to rein Junior in, but they can’t. He’s making them too much money.

Sports are measured by their heroes. NASCAR--with its ostentatious “Salute to America” patriotism and pre-race solemnizations made “in Jesus’ name”--still caters to cultural conservatives. But in its own culture it has turned a corner. In pursuit of a younger, hipper demographic, its morals have become looser, its marketing and imagery more sexual, its heroes more Hollywood.

It was ever thus: Virtue has shallow pockets.