[ColdNoMore]

It's About Time! (start your engine here)

Within minutes of arriving in the infield at the first race I covered for Yahoo Sports, back in early 2008, I saw, propped on the back of a pickup truck, a whiteboard with a crudely scrawled racist caricature of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.

During one of my first visits to the lawless reaches of Turn 3 in the Daytona infield, a shirtless fan behind a makeshift bar pointed at me and a colleague and shouted a racial slur at us, cackling all the way. He wasn’t using it as any kind of identifier; it was clearly the nastiest thing he could think to say to us, and he wanted to see our reaction.

Each time, I blew off the racism as unfortunate, sure, but just part and parcel of NASCAR’s heritage. I’m not proud of that, in retrospect, but I’m not alone. So has virtually every other person who has ever attended a race and come into contact with the sometimes-subtle, always-present undercurrent of racism.

Good ol’ boys are the foundation of NASCAR, the excuse goes. Sure, sometimes they go too far. But you run them off, and what’s left?

NASCAR needs the good ol’ boys.

Not anymore. Not if the sport wants to survive.