I am writing in response to the column written about auto racing in the Oct. 21 DE (Josh Robinson, Cancel My Subscription). Yes, I would agree that you did put a price on your head with this column. There is information in this column that I agree with, yet much more information that shows your ignorance about auto racing.

First, I agree that football is the perfect example of an American sport because of the presence of sex and violence. Baseball, the lazy man’s sport, is a game in which only a few people actually do anything. One last sport is basketball which is very similar to soccer, except that you have to throw a ball in hoop instead of kicking a ball in a net.

Now, let’s talk about the whole reason I wrote to you in the first place. If you would like to know how people find the sport of auto racing interesting, just ask the millions of people who watch auto racing on television every week. If that is not good enough, ask the fans who attend these races 32 weeks a year. For approximately the last five years, every Winston Cup race has been a complete sell-out. This is no small accomplishment, because six of those race tracks hold more than 150,000 people. Auto racing has quickly became one of the most attended sports in America.

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Driving a race car may not appear to be physically demanding to you, but the closest thing to a race car that you have probably have ever driven is a four-cylinder Escort or a car very similar to that. Running 500 continuous laps on a one-mile oval, in a car that is over 100 degrees inside, is very comparable to playing four quarters of basketball or football. In fact, many drivers and pit crews are on very strict diet and weight-training programs. They are working hard to lose the tobacco-spitting, beer-bellied image of drivers that many people hold today.