Christopher Rogers is a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat born in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. He listens to National Public Radio (his favorite show is Morning Edition). He holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature and a master’s in journalism and works in the marketing department of a Pennsylvania software company. He’s 33, single, loves Broadway shows and...

...stock car racing.

He loves the rumble, the roar and the vrooom.

"These cars are fast!" Rogers enthuses. "They’re clipping around, depending on the track, at 195 miles an hour, and they’re six inches apart from each other and they’ll be three cars wide, 10 cars deep, traveling that way for three and a half hours. It’s amazing!"

Turning Rogers onto stock car racing (he attends an average of five races a year) is another victory for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (Nascar, the sanctioning body for the Nextel Cup, Busch and Craftsman Truck series of races). Rogers represents the type of person Nascar increasingly has been trying to attract in an aggressive effort to shed its Bubba image and grow the sport. During the 1990s, under the stewardship of second-generation Nascar president Bill France Jr. (whose father "Big Bill" France founded Nascar in 1948), the sanctioning body jump-started a campaign to attract fans from outside Nascar’s traditional southern base and in so doing become America’s most popular spectator sport.

And Nascar has succeeded to an extraordinary extent. This month, as the 2006 season kicks off Feb. 11 at Daytona International Speedway, Nascar racing is second only to the National Football League (NFL) in television ratings. Last year, 75 million fans went to the track to watch the cars go round and round, making Nascar the nation’s most-watched sport. Indeed, Nascar has grown so popular that five television networks, including Fox, ABC and ESPN, signed a contract in December valued at $4.48 billion to broadcast Nascar’s various races for eight years beginning in 2007. That’s almost double the estimated $2.4 billion deal Fox, NBC and TBS signed with Nascar in 1999, which expires this year.

It’s hard to overstate how Nascar has grown during the past 10 years. From 1995 to 2004, its estimated fan base ballooned 19 percent, from 63 million to 75 million; the number of Nextel Cup series events that take place above and beyond the Mason-Dixon line doubled from nine to 18; retail sales of licensed Nascar merchandise rose more than 250 percent, from approximately $600 million to $2.1 billion. And today, more Fortune 500 companies sponsor Nascar than any other sport.