Glance at the dozen drivers in this year's NASCAR Chase for the Sprint Cup playoff and one might never guess that NASCAR has its roots in the South.
Reigning champion Jimmie Johnson is a Californian. Kurt Busch is from Nevada. Tony Stewart hails from Indiana and Carl Edwards from Missouri. Juan Pablo Montoya did grow up south of the Mason-Dixon line, but he's not from the land of Dixie, he's from Colombia.
Mark Martin is from Arkansas and Denny Hamlin is a Virginian, but most drivers in the Sprint Cup Series are no longer Southern natives as was the case in NASCAR's first four decades.
Until that change occurred, passionate NASCAR fans knew that Level Cross, N.C., meant Richard Petty; Kannapolis, N.C., meant Dale Earnhardt; and "The Alabama Gang" meant Bobby and Donnie Allison, Neil Bonnett and others.
"I'm certainly resistant" to the change "because I am a Southern boy," quipped Bobby Allison, who retired in 1988 after winning 84 NASCAR Cup races. "But it's a product of the incredible interest in NASCAR Cup racing not only in the other states but around the world."
Yet as the series arrives for Sunday's Pepsi 500 at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, the fourth race in this year's Chase, how exactly did drivers from beyond the South eventually dominate NASCAR's premier ranks?
The evolution paralleled NASCAR's overall expansion in popularity in the last two decades. Until then, NASCAR largely was a regional sport that was born in the South, as were its drivers, with races mostly in the South.
But starting in the early 1990s, a growing number of young drivers around the country sought careers in stock-car racing because NASCAR was growing. Its races started appearing on television every weekend, and later the sport expanded to new tracks in Fontana, Chicago, Kansas City, Las Vegas and Fort Worth.
According to Cup driver Matt Kenseth, the main catalyst for the change was the arrival in 1993 of a boyish-looking Californian named Jeff Gordon, who had moved to Indiana as a youngster initially to pursue a career racing Indy-style cars.
Gordon instead switched to stock cars and won his first NASCAR Cup race in only his second year, in 1994. And in 1995, he won the series championship at age 24 -- his first of four titles.
"When Jeff Gordon came along and did that good out of the box, I think that opened a lot of car owners' eyes," Kenseth said.
