The real race is under way well before the green flag

The alarm clock was supposed to go off at 7:45 a.m., but something happened. Maybe it was the dreaded "AM/PM" setting. Maybe "off" was sleepily struck instead of "snooze." It doesn't matter, not with the digital readout showing 8:30, and race day having long since dawned at Martinsville Speedway -- more than an hour away from the Greensboro, N.C., hotel room you're currently sitting in, rubbing your eyes and cursing the alarm and wondering how bad it's going to be.

You'll find out, soon enough. You shower, dress, and pack up the laptop. You're out the door in 20 minutes. No time for the free breakfast downstairs, no time for Starbucks, no time for anything. You zoom past the Greensboro airport and through rolling piedmont that would be pretty to look at if you weren't so concerned about other things. You make time on a four-lane road that reduces to two before the Virginia state line. No cops, thank goodness. Everything's going to be all right, you tell yourself. Just a Sunday morning drive. And you honestly believe that, until you crest the top of a hill, and see the monster sprawled out before you.

Race traffic.

You're maybe 10 miles from the racetrack now, but it doesn't matter. You're too late. You scan the state map, looking for some kind of side road, but there is none. It has you. You spend the next three hours inching along, the speedometer needle sometimes coming to a complete halt, moving more slowly than the guys walking down the side of the road hawking illegal T-shirts. Sure, you'll make it for the race. But Sunday mornings are when reporters get guys like Max Siegel of Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Geoff Smith of Roush Fenway Racing, team executives usually on site only on race days. Other writers, you're certain, are filling up notebooks while you're tooling along inside the belly of the beast.

And it's one that has to be dealt with every week. Drivers and team owners sleep in plush motor homes, either in the infield or in an adjoining lot. Crewmen are at the track at o'dark thirty. VIPs and executives fly over it all in helicopters. The rest of us who make a living in NASCAR have to face the traffic issue every Sunday. Two things reporters talk about more than anything else: hotels, and how early to leave on race morning. Six hours before the green flag, at least. Seven, just to be safe. Eight if there are extenuating circumstances, like the additional security surrounding President Bush's appearance at the Daytona 500 in 2004. It's not uncommon for reporters or PR reps to bring pillows, get to the track at daybreak, and sack out for a few more hours in the back seat of the rental car.

You try everything to beat it. You pore over maps and gazetteers. You hear rumors of secret, dirt-road back ways, some of which work out and some of which don't. You hear horror stories about somebody who's been coming in one way for years, only to find that police have blocked off his last left turn 100 feet from his parking space, and he has to go to the tail end of the two-hours-long line. You know a newspaper columnist who once tried to cover the Coca-Cola 600, never got there, and wrote a piece on traffic from his car. Yes, the real race on a Sprint Cup weekend begins not when the 43 cars roll off the starting grid, but hours earlier, as the 100,000 or more coming to see the event battle one another trying to get there. (Continued)