Blair Philips works on the front lines of a generational shift. As the fan club coordinator for veteran driver Dale Jarrett, whose 20-year career on NASCAR's premier series comes to an end this season, Philips is the one who takes all the phone calls and receives all the e-mails from faithful who don't want to see their hero go. They stem partly from a genuine affinity for Jarrett, a champion driver who cultivated a legion of followers with his genteel manner and North Carolina accent. But some also come from a very different place, one that has less to do with the pilot of the No. 44 car, and more to do with the sport he will soon leave behind.

"People say, 'I don't know who I'm going to pull for now.' They just feel like this is a generation where there is no one to fill those shoes," said Philips, who added that the official Jarrett fan club numbers several thousand members strong. "It's a different skill set. In their opinion, [the younger drivers] didn't build their skills from the bottom up, like the retiring generation did. They're on the newer side of NASCAR compared to the old-school side of NASCAR."

And the students of that old-school side of NASCAR, men who did much of the heavy lifting in building the sport's national presence, are slowly fading away. Jarrett will race the first five points events of this season, compete in the all-star exhibition, and then slip into retirement, following the lead of Rusty Wallace, Terry Labonte and Ricky Rudd. Dale Earnhardt and Bobby Hamilton have passed into the beyond. Ward Burton and Ken Schrader have been left without Cup-level rides. Sterling Marlin, Mark Martin and Bill Elliott are racing on limited schedules, the clock ticking ever closer to the time when they will slide out of their cars for good.

It is the swan song for likely the last generation to compete at the sport's top level into their 50s, men who gave NASCAR a bankable cadre of stars at the same moment it became a staple of network television, drivers who saw their series transformed before their eyes. The members of this generation began their careers racing against Richard Petty and Bobby Allison, in vehicles like Buicks and Oldsmobiles, on tracks like North Wilkesboro and Riverside. They're closing against Juan Montoya and Toyota, at facilities spanning from Miami to Chicago to Las Vegas. They started by putting their own sweat and money into their cars, became rich beyond their dreams, and in the process endeared themselves to spectators who saw a little of themselves in these gritty, battle-scarred drivers who worked so hard for what they had.

"One characteristic they seem to share is coming up the hard way. You can see the emotional scars on them sometimes from that," said Max Muhleman, a Charlotte sports consultant and marketer with a long history in motorsports. "Whether it's in sports or business or education or music or whatever your calling is, coming up the hard way, finding your way through hard times, is good for the soul and the character. People recognize that. Fans recognize that, and they like that."

Now, times are changing. Drivers like Jarrett and Wallace are leaving, and being replaced by younger drivers who may brim with talent, but sometimes struggle to connect with the ticket-holding public in the way their predecessors did. These are kids who were quite literally born to race, who have been pedaling go-karts or miniature cars since their pre-teen days, with parents who have orchestrated their careers like any Little League dad or soccer mom. They're making big money and driving great equipment at an age when their forerunners were often scraping by and driving junk.

The old-schoolers in the grandstand seats, who rooted for Rusty and Ricky and the Intimidator and the King, watch this evolution and squirm. Many of these young drivers, just now beginning to populate the Sprint Cup and Nationwide tour ranks, are fast. They teem with potential. But how is the guy in Row 88, Seat 16 supposed to relate to a 20-year-old with a tricked-out motorhome and a jet?

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"The old-schoolers in the grandstand seats, who rooted for Rusty and Ricky and the Intimidator and the King, watch this evolution and squirm."

"I can remember calling Rusty Wallace on the phone in Missouri before he went Cup racing, and he said, 'Oh, I have to wipe my hands off first.' You know he was elbow-deep in grease. Harry Gant, he was always up shingling his roof. Guys aren't doing that any more. And that working person, that stiff sitting in the grandstand who's made us what we are and is going to continue to make us, they don't have as much affinity toward the driver," said H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler, president of Lowe's Motor Speedway.

"This is a working person, somebody driving a pickup truck, who's living a little better than normal but is still a paycheck guy. He has a little trouble relating to somebody 25 years old who has a jet airplane and a million-dollar RV and who may not speak to him if he's at the track. I see some of these kids in these Legends cars, 15, 16 years old, who have already won 100 races in something. They've never had to do anything. Their father has a nice rig and a mechanic to work full time. What's that kid going to be like when he's 18 or 19 years old? Is he even going to have any common ground with that person running a backhoe, or who's a mechanic at the Chevy place, or is a coal miner up in West Virginia? Does he know about that? He's lived a cloistered life."

Not so for the driver who came before him, who knew Richard Petty not as a car owner and an icon, but a ruthless competitor on the track and a statesman off it. These were drivers who raced to live more than they lived to race, who came up at a time when the sport was still very much a blue-collar job. They shook hands and signed autographs and pitched souvenirs because they had to -- not by a sponsor's order, but by a bottom line that needed to be met. They hustled dollars whenever they could, cut deals with sponsors and car owners, and sometimes even underwrote the costs themselves. And over time, their struggles became NASCAR's success.

EVERYMAN QUALITIES

Jim Hunter was worried. The president of Darlington Raceway had invited Jarrett, then only beginning to rise to stardom on NASCAR's premier circuit, to speak at several high schools in the area as part of a program organized by the track. It was all scheduled for a Monday morning, the day after the Daytona 500 -- which Jarrett proceeded to win. This was before the race champion was sent on a media tour of New York, but even so Jarrett didn't get back to his Charlotte-area home until 2 a.m. The high school tour was set to begin at 8.

"I thought, 'Good grief, I'll bet you Dale isn't going to show up,'" said Hunter, now a vice president at NASCAR. "But he was there for that 8 o'clock deal. He got home at 2, got up at 5, and drove to Darlington and made the appearance after winning the Daytona 500. He carved out a place in my mind. It would have been so easy for him to call and say, 'I'm not going to be able to make it. I won the Daytona 500, I've got stuff to do.' But he didn't."

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"We were doing autograph sessions, doing a lot of stuff outside the sport for our sponsors to get our name out, to make an extra grand so we could keep going." -- Jimmy Spencer

It's an example, Hunter added, that many of today's younger drivers can learn from. Jarrett and his peers rose to power at a time when NASCAR was breaking free of its provincial roots, but before its popularity began to overwhelm the accessibility that made fans feel like they actually knew many of their favorite drivers. Media coverage was only a fraction of what it is today, so drivers and car sponsors couldn't rely on television to get their message out. They had to do it themselves.

"Drivers had to work hard to sell souvenirs. One of the key things in their income, probably the primary income for a lot of drivers, was souvenirs," Wheeler said. "The only way to sell souvenirs in those days was to get out and mingle with the fans. If you didn't get out and do that, you just didn't sell souvenirs. To a significant degree, that's gone now."

Now, top drivers work under contracts so large that the purse money is a pittance by comparison. That wasn't the case when Jimmy Spencer and his peers were trying to break into the sport.

"We were doing autograph sessions, doing a lot of stuff outside the sport for our sponsors to get our name out, to make an extra grand so we could keep going," said Spencer, a two-time race winner on NASCAR's top level and now an analyst for SPEED. "You look at the purses and stuff, you had one or two races that paid a good payout. Now, every race is a $4-5 million minimum payout. We were racing for a $1 million payout for 43 cars. So there is a big difference."

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when this outgoing generation was just beginning to assert itself in NASCAR, it was common for drivers to fly commercial aircraft or stay in hotels, where fans would be waiting for them in the lobby on race weekend. Now drivers young and old alike are golf-carted from one enclave to another, be it a helipad or an executive airport or a guarded motorhome lot. Much of that, as Spencer will admit, is by necessity -- facilities have gotten bigger, sponsors and tracks demand more in terms of appearances, and drivers can't afford to be stuck in traffic. But it also creates a buffer, another layer separating the competitor from the fan paying to see him compete.

Don't get Wheeler started on motorhomes. "Ten, 15 years ago, there weren't many. Guys stayed in hotels and motels. They had to interact with fans. They were in the lobby. Today, they're not. They're on a Prevost somewhere watching HDTV. They're rock stars," he said.

"These guys keep distancing themselves from the fans. Not all of them, but some of them. They don't want to be bothered. They're going to learn the hard way, the very, very, really hard way, that that is not going to work in the long run. They can't isolate themselves. If they do, their incomes are going to start dropping, particularly once car owners start leveling out these salaries."

But it was more than just accessibility. Because of where they came from, drivers of this outgoing generation acquired something of an everyman quality that made them more relevant to the middle-aged males that have historically made up a chunk of the NASCAR fan base. Those fans appreciated the fact that Jarrett once worked as a printing press operator and a car salesman, that Elliott once had to scrape together money for entrance fees, that Schrader once had to rent cars from an owner before proving himself on the racetrack. It somehow made them more human, the fact that so many of them started by paying their own way, that they knew how to fix their cars as well as drive them.

Hunter, a sports writer before he moved into track and series management, remembers looking out his hotel window in Indianapolis years ago when the forerunner to the Nationwide Series was racing on the short track in nearby Clermont. There was Martin, changing the engine in his racecar.

"They came back to the hotel and they changed the motor overnight, right outside the door to his room. I know, because I was staying there, right down the hall," Hunter said. "They worked all night. It was his car, his own car. He was just a kid then. But you talk about something like that today, these young guys can't relate to that."

But almost every member of Martin's generation can. "I borrowed 500 bucks from my mom to get a set of tires so I could race one weekend," Spencer remembered. "I told her I'd pay her back. I was fortunate. I won the race, I won 1,200 bucks, and I paid her back. I guess what I'm getting at is, did these [younger drivers] ever own their own racecar? Maybe mom or dad did. I remember meeting Schrader, I moved down here with my family in the back seat of a station wagon, wondering where we were going to get our next paycheck. These guys, they're getting signed up as 18-year-old, 17-year-old kids. Tell me, what have you won?"

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"I borrowed 500 bucks from my mom to get a set of tires so I could race one weekend." -- Jimmy Spencer

YOUTH MOVEMENT

In their defense, the younger drivers of today, those bonus babies who become rich and famous long before they ever win their first Sprint Cup race -- if they ever win one at all -- are only falling in line with their contemporaries in other pro sports. A first-round NFL draft pick isn't forced to float the costs of his own equipment, a budding baseball star doesn't have to pay his way into the majors, a can't-miss NBA prospect isn't going to have to beg to get into the gym. As NASCAR has become more inherently professional, so has driving as an occupation. These aren't regular guys anymore. They're highly specialized athletes who have been groomed for the position, which now comes with all the perks and benefits of a quarterback or a starting pitcher.

But potential does not equal popularity. This is a sport that has long preferred its heroes a little rough around the edges, and this retiring generation produced no shortage of tough men burnished by tough times. Some of that was handed down to their immediate successors, the drivers who are the top stars on the Sprint Cup circuit today. Tony Stewart and Kevin Harvick can be every bit as rough-and-tumble as Spencer once was. Dale Earnhardt Jr. once toiled in a Chevy dealership, Kurt Busch repaired broken water lines, Carl Edwards handed out business cards to prospective car owners, Denny Hamlin worked for his father's trailer business.

No driver, as Muhleman points out, makes it to NASCAR's top levels without paying dues of some kind. But as drivers get younger, they're perceived as paying fewer dues. In the era that produced Wallace and Jarrett, drivers didn't get into top-quality equipment until their late 20s or early 30s. Jarrett was 34 when he finally landed his big break, with the Wood Brothers. Jeff Gordon changed that, proving that younger drivers could succeed, and launching a race to find the next young star. The results are on display now, in the form of very young, very well-supported drivers trying to climb the career ladder. They're the product of an age where pitching the sponsor is as important as driving the racecar, and not everyone likes what they see.

"I think these guys are coming in cold turkey, getting these great rides, and not producing and not performing," Spencer said. "And the biggest thing I believe is, they have no personality. I think that has a lot to do with the fans, they can't get close to them. I want to wear a Dale Earnhardt Jr. T-shirt. I want to wear Dale Earnhardt Sr., or Rusty, or Jarrett. I can relate to these guys. Why would I ever want to wear a David Ragan or a Reed Sorenson T-shirt? The reason why is they are young kids who haven't done anything."

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"[Fans] hold it against them. I wouldn't say it's fair, but inevitably, the guys who came up in that [older] era had what we'd call in other sports or other activities street smarts." -- Max Muhleman

Their age, in many ways, works against them. They're apt to be a little quieter, a little more reserved, a little more difficult to figure out. Their personalities aren't yet fully defined, as would be the case with anyone equivalent in age to a college underclassman. They can come across and spoiled and aloof, even if they're not.

"I think a lot of it is either the perceived or the real attitude of younger drivers today, where some people see them as snot-nosed kids with a lot of money," Hunter said. "When a young guy becomes a millionaire overnight, it's hard for young people like that to not want to go out and spend a lot of money. So I think they probably send off the wrong vibes. But you have to remember these guys are in their late teens or early 20s, and happen to have a heck of a lot of talent when it comes to driving a racecar."

But winning acceptance from the people in the grandstand isn't easy. "In many cases, they didn't have that hard experience driving that sportsman, modified, junker or whatever they drive on Saturday nights for years and years, particularly in the South, that [fans] know Schrader or Ricky or DJ or Rusty did," Muhleman said. "They hold it against them. I wouldn't say it's fair, but inevitably, the guys who came up in that [older] era had what we'd call in other sports or other activities street smarts. They went through hard knocks university."

And their earlier experiences colored their entire careers. These are drivers who didn't make it big until later in life, who were into middle age before they scored the kind of big-money contracts that some drivers now are signing fresh out of high school. They stuck with the grind through long, 20-year careers knowing the payoff was at the end. They will almost certainly be the last generation to do that -- the demands are so much now, the money so big, that no one foresees successive generations driving until beyond their 50th birthday, as has been the case with Jarrett, Schrader, Marlin and others.

"These guys make way too much money to start with now. I'm kidding, they earn every bit of it, but that does factor into some of it," said Jarrett, 51.

"It wears you down. I know there's always been pressure in this sport, because of the magnitude of this sport, and the sponsors that we have involved, the expectations that are placed on each and every driver and team out there. It wears you down mentally. I think that's why you'll see these guys come in, make a 15-year run at it, and that will be kind of it. Plus, they're starting [so young]. There weren't many people who got the opportunity to drive these racecars at 19 and 20 years old; back in the '70s, '80s, you just didn't get that chance. A lot of us were well into our 20s or even early 30s before we got a really good chance to get in good equipment. I don't think you'll see them be as long in it, because you have that change."

In many ways the change in driver has been a reflection of the changes within NASCAR itself, which over time has become more national, more cosmopolitan, more professional. Its athletes have become more like athletes in other pro sports, where big money, exclusivity and preferential treatment have been standard for decades. It is a different atmosphere producing different drivers, ones perhaps more capable of handling the sport's demands on the track, but less able to relate to spectators off it. It's a change that's seemed almost inevitable given NASCAR's growth, one that may not sit well with men and women in the grandstand until those men and women themselves change.

"I don't think we can let ourselves go off the deep end and say, 'Oh, without these guys driving in leather brogans and not having private jets, what are we going to do?' Things are still good, they're just good in a different way," Muhleman said. "It is inevitable that it changes, and not everybody will like that. The drivers of today are different, they're just different, because the sport is imposing different circumstances upon them, and it's asking for different qualities than was the case before. So it's logical to think you're going to get a different kind of personality."