Within minutes of arriving in the infield at the very first race I covered for Yahoo Sports, back in early 2008, I saw, propped on the back of a pickup truck, a whiteboard with a crudely-scrawled racist caricature of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.
During one of my first visits to the lawless reaches of Turn 3 in the Daytona infield, a shirtless fan behind a makeshift bar pointed at me and a colleague and shouted the n-word at us, cackling all the way. He wasn’t using it as any kind of identifier; it was clearly the nastiest thing he could think to say to us, and he wanted to see our reaction.