This Week In New York

TWI-NY TALK: ANDREW GIANGOLA

Mario Batali, Andrew Giangola, and Rachael Ray party it up at Texas Motor Speedway

THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY: TRUE STORIES OF REMARKABLE NASCAR FANS by Andrew Giangola (Motorbooks International, February 2010, $24.99)
www.theweekendstartsonwednesday.blogspot.com

We’ve known Andrew Giangola since we were kids, playing baseball in the street, sledding down what we thought were enormous hills in the local park, and going to semipro football games. Although New York is far from the center of the auto racing world, we did go to the track once, when a cigar-chomping family friend took us behind the scenes and into the pit. That apparently rubbed off on Giangola, who has been the director of communications for NASCAR since 2003, traveling around the country chaperoning star drivers and meeting the fans. He has turned his adventures into an entertaining book, THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY, which looks at dozens of NASCAR’s most dedicated fanatics, from movie icons and beauty queens to military heroes and astronauts, from news anchors and celebrity chefs to an acrophobic mountain climber and a dude who wears nothing but a tire.

“After sleeping in their buses, watching races in their homes, spending countless hours on the phone, sitting in the grandstands, and walking campgrounds on the circuit,” Giangola writes in the introduction, “I’m convinced NASCAR’s ‘core’ fans are a special, different breed…. I want to perpetuate a new stereotype of NASCAR fans. They are, at their core, very good people.” Giangola, who lives in New York City with his wife, daughter, and two dogs — and whose last driving ticket was for going zero miles per hour, blocking the box at the Holland Tunnel — took a break from his media blitz to answer a few questions from an old friend.

twi-ny: You grew up on the South Shore of Long Island, not exactly a hotbed of auto racing. You’ve always been a huge sports fan, but tell the truth — what did you think of NASCAR when you first applied for the position, and how do you feel about it now?

AG: Your father took us to a stock car race at the old short track in Freeport, LI, when I was eleven and I loved it. (That track is now a strip mall.) I also watched [Richard] Petty and [David] Pearson and [Cale] Yarborough on WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS when NASCAR snippets were shown between ping-pong and cliff diving. When I was exposed to the sport, I always liked it. But growing up on Long Island in the ’70s, you didn’t see a lot of NASCAR; the sport might as well have been racing on Mars. There was no ESPN or 24/7 sports coverage. I was by no means a fan.

When I got the job offer, after a quick web search it was pretty clear pretty fast that this is a big, powerful brand with a lot of company involvement. My real shock was at the first race; it happened to be Talladega, NASCAR’s biggest and rowdiest track, in the heart of Alabama. I was wearing black slacks and a black shirt. A fan gripping a large beer yells down from the top of his converted school bus, “When are the aliens coming?” It was immediately clear NASCAR fans were familiar with the film MEN IN BLACK and that I’d need to learn the rules of the road, so to speak. Seven years later, I was sleeping with those fans — not in the biblical sense; it was research — and published THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY about the most amazing fan stories.

You’ve worked in communications for Pepsi and Simon & Schuster, handling different kinds of crises than you encounter at NASCAR. What’s the hardest part of your current job? You’re also a wise-ass who was once championed as the savior of the PR business. How do you get away with your sarcastic sense of humor at such a giant, serious company?

I’m not sure anyone ever championed me as a savior but that’s nice of you to say, and let me introduce you to my boss at an upcoming race. This is such a decentralized, multifaceted industry. You have NASCAR the sanctioning body, teams, tracks, drivers, sponsors, licensees, media partners. In a sense, in my job in PR out of NASCAR’s New York office, I serve them all. It keeps a man busy. I’ve worn out about five BlackBerries. No trackball has proven to be up to my workload. My daughter, Gaby, once said, “If work were crack, you’d sell me for a bag of it.” The toughest challenge is keeping some semblance of family balance while attempting to make every man, woman, child, and dog in the US of A a stock car racing fan.

You’re a die-hard Rangers fan, but you’ve claimed on your blog and in the book that NASCAR fans are the greatest in the world. Is that a diss to the Garden Faithful?

When the Rangers play on Saturday night, do the fans start sleeping in front of the Garden on a Wednesday? That’s what it’s like in NASCAR. But I think Ranger fans and NASCAR fans have a lot in common in their tremendous passion for their sports. (Go to a NASCAR track like Pocono Raceway or Dover and you’ll see a lot of cops and firemen in the infield who are big Ranger fans.) Remember, on any given Sunday in NASCAR there’s one winner and forty-two losers. Ranger fans can relate to that continual, gut-wrenching, seemingly endless heartbreak. All that said, I still tell my wife, Viviane, that the day we were married was almost as good as that warm night in June of 1994 when the Rangers finally won the Stanley Cup.

THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY, which features a foreword by Tony Stewart and an afterword by Kyle Busch, is available now at online sites and bookstores everywhere. Giangola will be meeting and greeting fans at racing’s biggest event, the Daytona 500, this weekend, with eight fans from the book joining him for a special launch event and signing at the Sprint Experience on Saturday.