CRAZY ABOUT... NASCAR; AUTO-RACING CIRCUIT TRAILS ONLY FOOTBALL IN POPULARITY.

Byline: Bill Schlotter Daily News Staff Writer

It must seem strange to Red Byron, Fireball Roberts, Marshall Teague and the other late, great pioneers of NASCAR auto racing. The baby they nursed through a Southern infancy will celebrate its 50th birthday tonight with a gala Hollywood TV party.

Hollywood? Why they might as well hold the dang thing in New York City.

But if 1998 Southern California culture seems worlds away from that of 1949 Daytona Beach, Fla., where the tour was born, equally distant are the cars, drivers, tracks and fans of that era from those of today.

In 1949, NASCAR (National Association of Stock Car Automobile Racing) was almost exclusively the passion of a sports-starved South, which watched workaday sorts chase after a few extra bucks on weekends. Today, the business of auto racing is on the cutting edge, drivers earn six- and seven-figure salaries and their fan base is nationwide and outgrowing that of every other sport.

Five generations of stock car drivers will gather at the Wiltern Theater tonight, where the latest of them will be as nationally recognizable as any of the movie stars and recording artists present. (ESPN will broadcast a tape of the evening Saturday at 4 p.m.) On Sunday, the party moves to Fontana's California Speedway, where more than 100,000 fans are expected to watch NASCAR's best drivers - the Winston Cup Tour - compete in the California 500.

Yes, NASCAR is coming to Hollywood. And it comes not as some gratuitously invited country relation but as a $2 billion-per-year burgeoning giant in the sports entertainment industry.

Consider that:

NASCAR events drew 10.5 million fans to race tracks in 1996. Television broadcasts were watched by 150 million viewers.

NASCAR's fan base has increased by 65.5 percent since 1990.

With 32 NASCAR Winston Cup events in 1997, the average race-day attendance was 180,000.

Each race is estimated to enhance the local economy by $60-80 million, making it equivalent in impact to the Super Bowl.

It's been a long trip from the dirt tracks and small galleries of those early tracks to the super speedways and six-figure attendance of today. Those who have studied that growth give most of the credit to NASCAR founding father Bill France Sr.

``Bill France got it right,'' said financial expert and author Robert G. Hagstrom, whose book, ``The NASCAR Way, The Business That Drives the Sport,'' (John Wiley & Sons, New York) went on sale in February. ``He had a theory that people would enjoy, appreciate and attend racing events that featured sport sedans - cars they could identify with.''

Or as NASCAR communications manager Jeff Motley puts it: ``Not everybody can hit a 400-foot home run. Not everybody can slam-dunk a basketball. But everybody can drive a car.''

At a time when other racing events in the South largely involved modified, souped-up pre-World War II cars, France's fledgling NASCAR tour limited racers to all-stock equipment their fans could buy off a car lot downtown.

NASCAR grew from eight sanctioned events in 1949 to 19 in 1950 to 41 in 1951.

While NASCAR was a hit through the 1950s, it was largely a regional one. With big-league baseball, football and basketball yet to move into the region, auto racing owned sports-minded Southerners, with the exception of college football Saturdays. And it sunk its roots deep into Southern soil.

It took technological advances and bad weather to begin to bring the rest of the country into the fold.

NASCAR felt it had scored a coup when it convinced CBS television to broadcast the 1979 Daytona 500 live. When a blizzard kept Americans in the Northeast and Midwest homebound in front of their televisions, it had a far-greater victory than it could have hoped.

What those viewers saw was race leaders Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough take each other out in a crash on the last lap, then get into a fist fight while Richard Petty came from third place to win. It was great television. CBS won an Emmy for its broadcast and NASCAR was instantly an up-and-comer on the national sports scene.

In the 1980s, the organization got a boost from corporate America.

Racing teams had always partly depended on sponsorship to meet the expenses of racing. Oil companies, tire makers and auto-parts stores chipped in to help make the sport possible.

But during the 1980s, industrial giants - DuPont, Kellogg's, General Foods - began to come on board, giving millions to racing teams for the right to paint their corporate logos on race-cars hoods.

``Companies realized that the return they could get from sponsorship-based marketing is off the charts,'' said Hagstrom. ``For every dollar they spend on sponsorship, they are getting four and five times more visibility than they can get through other forms of advertising.''

According to ``The Sponsors Report,'' a marketing publication issued by the media research firm Joyce, Julius and Associates, some remarkable returns were earned last year by NASCAR corporate sponsors, who pony up an average of $6-7 million per year to be a team's major sponsor. For its investment, Valvoline earned more than $43 million in comparable exposure, the report said. Ford Quality Care received just less than $34 million and DuPont got about $33.5 million.

``It's just become a very valuable marketing tool,'' Hagstom said.

NASCAR's exposure grew even greater in the 1980s with the arrival of all-sports cable television networks, such as ESPN.

``Cable television couldn't break into the baseball, basketball or football markets because they were all locked up by the major networks,'' Hagstrom said. ``So they took on motor racing because there was no competition.''

Their success was shocking even to themselves, Hagstrom said.

``They were simply floored by their ratings, which were competitive with everything except football,'' he said.

Whatever the explanation, NASCAR has arrived on the American sporting scene as not only the preeminent American racing tour, but as the second most popular sport overall. Football is first. Multi-million dollar speedways are going up around the country, with new tracks in Fontana, Dallas, Miami and Las Vegas and two others on the drawing board in Denver and Kansas City. Those already running want more NASCAR events.

Hagstrom said NASCAR will retain its stature and continue to grow if it avoids some of the pitfalls of success that have damaged other sports.

The tour seems especially concerned about keeping its image clean.

Unlike some baseball, football and basketball stars, NASCAR drivers strive to be seen as regular people who enjoy their fans, live by the rules and appreciate what the sport has given them. So far, drug abuse and other scandal has been rare.

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Photo, Box

Photo: (Color) Jheri Birchett of Fremont, a Dale Earnhardt fan, sported a Chevy logo at the '97 California 500.

David R. Crane/Daily News

Box: STILL GROWING