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I'll be over Talladega soon. When I went to a baseball game on Monday night, I got dizzy in the parking lot because I was worried it might start going 200 miles an hour.

Whoa. Okay. Just be still. It's not moving. It's just a parking lot.

Races at Talladega stick with you a while. It's not just a speedway. It's a Superspeedway. Superman would win every race except for the Kryptonite.

I don't love Talladega. I'm attracted to it. It's a girl at a bar with a "come hither" leer. No good can come of it, but, damn, she's hot.

The difference between Talladega and a horror flick is that, for many years now, everyone has walked away. It was not always so. The first time I covered a race there, a car driven by Jimmy Horton sailed out of the track. He walked away, but another driver in the same race, Stanley Smith, didn't.

That race, swear to God, was the DieHard 500, but Smith lived to race again, not at NASCAR's highest level, but he won an All Pro race in Kentucky 11 years later.

Driving home from Talladega – it was 1993, and was a rookie on the NASCAR beat -- I stopped for gas at a station near Atlanta, and a flatbed truck carrying Horton's battered No. 32 was filling up, too. I looked at the wreckage.

If chills down the spine were nickels, Talladega would have made me rich.

Now, though, it's safe, or it seems safe because nearly every car in the field can wreck, 18 of them can wreck twice, and three of the ones that wrecked twice can finish in the top 10.

Only in America, the land of opportunity.

Fans don't come to the track to see death. They come to see death defied, whether by skilled daredevils lining up and playing real-life Tetris, or by smoke, fire, screeching metal, and drivers hunched over, trying to get their breath so that they can talk about it on TV.

The generally accepted rehearsal begins, "Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name ..."

When the threat of rain hovers over Talladega, every driver races every lap as if it were the last. It's not really harsh to say he drives like a lunatic. Broaden the bounds of that definition, and every driver is a lunatic.

A grown man (and a woman), by his (her) own choice, climbs into a race car and willingly goes nearly 200 mph surrounded by 39 other cars driven by 39 other lunatics.

The great virtue of auto racing is that it prevents those drivers from wrestling hippopotami for a living.