The Wall Street Journal reports that a Northern Michigan University professor has concluded that stock car racing has “a hidden past” as the paper puts it (emphasis is mine).

“It’s almost a direct carryover from the Middle Ages,” says Karyn Rybacki, a professor of communication studies and public relations at Northern Michigan University. Ms. Rybacki, who studies stock-car racing, says the cultural elements of Nascar races — where fans travel many miles to attend, wear the colors of their favorite teams and virtually knight popular drivers — may be directly descended from medieval times, when people came in droves to make merry before another fast and dangerous form of competition, the joust.

“The more I dug into the history, the more I saw the parallels,” says Ms. Rybacki, who has presented papers on the topic and wrote about it in a recent anthology “The Sporting World of the Modern South.” She notes that the late Nascar hero Dale Earnhardt carried the moniker “The Black Knight.”

Instead of the horse, you have horsepower,” she says.

Ms. Rybacki says the similarities first struck her when she received a grant more than a decade ago to research fan behavior at the Daytona 500. She likens the giant mugs of beer, sausage and roasted turkey legs popular at Nascar concessions to the foods served at medieval festivals. “It was almost like being thrown into a Renaissance fair without the medieval costumes,” she says.

Uh, okay….

I can hear Dale laughing right now.