full send.

or: Hail Melon, full of grace, the wall is with thee.

Hey -

I know, I’m surprised to see me here, too. ‘Been a minute.

So here’s the deal:

In late 2022, something extraordinary happened. And I’ve been thinking about it over a year later, almost every goddamn day since.

It happened, I should warn you here, in sports. In fact, in NASCAR. Yeah: Loud, Days of Thunder, let’s-go-Brandon-ass NASCAR — if you even consider large adult sons in large loud machines making long left turns for hours a sport. It’s one I didn’t care about before any of this, and still don’t now. That’s all to say that if this already sounds like something you couldn’t care less about, well:

(A) Same, trust me, I get it, and
(B) Stay with me, here.

Because it’s not just the greatest thing you probably haven’t heard of that happened in sports (or “sports”) last year (or maybe the last five years). It’s also one of the more fascinating, psychotic, downright inspiring things a human has done on this planet lately.

And I’m sitting here, writing to you about it, just a few hours before the 2024 hits, because it’s crucial, to me, for what’s about to happen next year. And maybe — just maybe — for you.

So: There’s this driver, Ross Chastain. Seems like a goofy, nice guy. Besides being relatively successful in NASCAR, he’s also (among other things) an eighth-generation watermelon farmer. That’s relevant not because it’s an oddball fact about an oddball guy who did the most oddball thing — even though it is, he clearly is, and he definitely did — but because the thing he did would come to be known as the Hail Melon. And that thing is this:

It’s October 30th, 2022 at Martinsville Speedway in Ridgeway, Virginia, and Ross Chastain is headed into the final lap of the Xfinity 500 in tenth place, driving somewhere around the average speed that day, 113 MPH. ‘Problem is: he doesn’t need the average speed — he needs to go a hell of a lot faster. Because

1. He needs to make up two places. Otherwise, Denny Hamlin, up there in fifth place, will beat Ross Chastain by two points in the standings, and Ross Chastain will get knocked out of the championship series, and is done for the year.

2. There is a shitshow of traffic in front of him. Especially on the middle to lower end of the track, where the fastest racing lines are.

And into the final turn he goes. In interviews after the race, Chastain was repeatedly asked where he got the idea from, if he ever practiced it before, if he talked about it with his team. He would tell them: No, never practiced it, never talked about it with the team. As for where he got the idea: the Nintendo GameCube edition of Nascar 2005 he used to play with his brother when they were kids. Yeah, a video game.

To everyone there, it started out looking like just another car, making its final yawning left turn around a big oval, just like all the other left turns it made. Until they realize:

Wait a second. Ross Chastain’s car — is there something wrong with it? — it’s hugging the wall. And not just hugging it, but smashed against it, getting literally shredded by it on the right side. And it is also screaming down the final straight, as he’s ripping past not one, not two, but five other cars to the right. It all happens in a flash.

Yes, they soon realize: Ross Chastain floored the gas, held the engine open, rode the wall, destroyed his car, and made up five places between the final turn and the finish line, passing poor Denny Hamlin (who didn’t know what just happened, along with four other totally bewildered drivers), thus securing his place in the next championship race. He also set a new record for the fastest lap ever recorded at the track, going 50MPH faster than the rest of the race. Have you ever seen a car drive by you going 50MPH faster than you? Right. You barely would. It looks like something out of a video game, like the car just fired a rocket behind it.

The broadcast footage of it hilarious and worth a watch, but the true treasure here is this video of the other drivers watching from their cars, in utter disbelief, bewilderment, and glee:

• Holy shit, did you see that? [Laughing]

• I guess it does work!

• That’s literally the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!

• ‘The shit was the 1 doing?’ ‘He was trying to play hold-it-wide-open-and-go.’ ‘He actually passed people doing that? Holy shit.’

• What in the hell?!

And so on, until you get to see it and hear it from Chastain’s view, himself. And you realize: Even he can’t believe it worked. There’s a reason the fans, pit crews, announcers, and drivers that day couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

In the aftermath, the world of NASCAR was shocked, jubilant, and occasionally in an uproar. How was that even legal?

Well: Nobody had ever tried it. Probably because, at worst, even the smallest protrusion could’ve sent him spinning into traffic, causing a potentially horrific accident. But also because nobody was that desperate. Or found that creativity in a moment of desperation. Though Chastain was simply demonstrating a law of physics known as centripetal force, he sure as hell didn’t know that at the time, and he had absolutely zero proof it’d work.

But it did. Chastain would later admit that the wall impact plus the gravitational force of his speed pinned his arm to his body, made him lose control of the wheel halfway through. He just had to remember, as sparks and metal and concrete are flying all around him: Just keep your foot down.

So much great art is about process more than the result. Which in this case was a smashed car, fifth place, and another shot at the championship the next week. And Ross Chastain did not, in fact, go on to win the NASCAR championship that year.

But, honestly? Whatever. Not every great glory involves winning. This guy did something so artful and unchecked that it bent the parameters of an entire sport, the dimensions of a track, the damage-sustaining capabilities of thousands of pounds of machine, and — sure — a law of physics to his will. Something to the point where NASCAR had to write a rule subsequently banning what he did forever, which will forever be known (colloquially, of course) as The Ross Chastain Rule.

Moreover: He made me remember that so often what we believe to be impossible is usually just something nobody’s given a shot yet. For whatever reason. All the universe, sure, but especially all great art, all great romances, all great moments of invention, they all start ex nihilo. And in an imaginative feat of desperation and pure moxie, Ross Chastain asked that great, audacious, simple, epic question — Why the hell not? — and demonstrated the virtue of what happens when you decide to just absolutely fucking send it.

All of that is to say: In 2024, may we all have the grace to ask the same of ourselves.

To that end, Fostertalk is coming back in 2024. Thanks for your patience and support. See you soon.

As ever,

-f.