Rusty Wallace | Pit Road | team manager | Jason Sheets

1:45 p.m.
It's race time and the pit crew has arrived (the road crew prepares the car for the weekend; the pit crew is the race-only team who go over the wall to pit the car). There is a superstition check: Nobody may be clean-shaven, wearing anything green, eating peanuts, or carrying $50 bills. We are all outfitted in full-body, fireproof suits, which offer 30 seconds of protection if they go up in flames, and head to Pit Road. The suit makes me look like one of the boys, but it's the shenanigans of the day before that assure me they've taken me in as one of their own.

After the first practice, Jason Sheets (rear-tire changer and mechanic, car 41) sent me on a wild-goose chase - a ­NASCAR hazing tradition. "Can you run and get me the long weight from the manager?" he said. "We need it quick." I hightailed it over to the team manager, Tony Glover, who sent me here and there before finally telling me to ask veteran driver Rusty Wallace, whose garage was the next one over.

"Car 41 needs that long weight, real quick-like," I told him. "I don't have it," ­Wallace said. "I tell you what, those little suckers are the hardest things to find!" I realized I'd been had, but I was in.

It was little preparation for the adrenaline rush that shoots through my veins as the gentlemen start their engines. The grandstands teem with fans. In the pit, 90-pound gas cans have been rolled in and 12 sets of tires are neatly arranged (Darlington's motto­ is "Too Tough to Tame" because the track chews up tires like police-issued spike strips). The pit's eerily quiet, like a seaside town in the eye of a hurricane, and the storm explodes around us in a deafening roar as cars shoot forward under the green flag.