Can NASCAR's most compelling driver in years steer into the mainstream?

One of NASCAR’s all-time characters is on the track right now, winning races and infuriating other drivers. But the country at large doesn’t know him. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, wonders if it’s too late for NASCAR to get any cultural traction.

If you fed the movie “Talladega Nights” into an AI program and asked it to spit out a real-life NASCAR driver, you’d end up with Ross Chastain.

He busts a watermelon on the track after every race he wins in tribute to his family’s eight generations of melon farming. He has had multiple brawls with other drivers after races. A few years ago, he put his own car into the wall at Martinsville to build up speed, like a marble rolling around a coffee can. He learned the move in a video game. NASCAR has made it illegal.

Oh, and by the way, on Memorial Day weekend he won one of the sport’s biggest races — the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. And he won after starting at the very back of the field — the first driver to do that in a top-tier NASCAR race since 1969.

So here’s my question: Could you pick Ross Chastain out of a lineup on the street? Have you ever even heard of him?

This is NASCAR’s intractable problem.

The sport still has a core of diehard fans who go to the races and watch on TV and buy the merch. But that moment in the ‘90s and early 2000s when it felt like NASCAR had broken through the larger American culture … that is long past.

Back then NASCAR felt like one of those action movies with Sylvester Stallone AND Arnold Schwarzenegger AND Bruce Willis. Fans held up three fingers for Dale Earnhardt like he was the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They held up one finger for Jeff Gordon, who was Earnhardt’s psychic opposite, with his honor-student looks and rainbow paint scheme. Gordon became such a mainstream star that he hosted “Saturday Night Live,” which makes me wonder what Dale Earnhardt hosting “Saturday Night Live” would have been like. I suspect Lynyrd Skynyrd would have been involved.

Beyond Earnhardt and Gordon, there were other drivers with big followings, like Bill Elliott — “Awesome Bill from Dawsonville” — and Darrell Waltrip and Rusty Wallace. Young’uns like Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jimmie Johnson were coming up. Legends like Junior Johnson and Richard Petty were still hanging around the track.

Of course, Dale Earnhardt died in a crash at Daytona in 2001, and that was like the moon leaving the Earth’s orbit. It felt like the sport still had lots of juice. But slowly the drivers started to feel a little more alike. The cars got a little harder to tell apart. The culture changed, too. Not as many people work on cars anymore. A lot of kids don’t even crave a driver’s license. It doesn’t take much to lose a casual fan. NASCAR still has brilliant drivers and some real characters. It just doesn’t have the same magic.

Amazon Prime has a four-part documentary on Earnhardt that just came out. It’s been 50 years since he started as a NASCAR Cup driver, and 24 years since he died, but he still jumps off the screen like Clint Eastwood. I wonder what it would be like if he was a young driver now. Maybe he’d find a way to break through. Or maybe he’d be like Ross Chastain, the star of a movie most people are no longer watching.