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On to Vegas There are no veterans at the three-year-old Nevada track
Posted: Monday February 28, 2000 03:08 PM
We’re coming up on either one of the most fun weeks of the season. Or one of the worst. It all depends on how you look at it, whether you are a driver, a mechanic or a car owner. We head to Las Vegas Motor Speedway this week. For a lot of us, it doesn’t matter where it is. When you feel like you’re going to have a good car, it’s always the best track you’ve ever raced at, the best place anyone ever had a race and you wonder why they aren’t all like that track. If you’re good in the middle of the desert, it’s a perfect market for NASCAR. If you’re bad in downtown Manhattan, well, you have some questions about why everybody is wasting their time there. Sears Point (Calif.) is a really good example. Road courses aren’t usually the best tracks for most drivers. So when the series went to Sears Point for the first time, I heard that a lot of people were complaining -- and some still do. ‘Why do we come way out here to race?’ and stuff like that. Well, if you’re a pretty decent road course racer, it’s easy to figure San Francisco is right over the hill from the place. If you struggle at a road course, then maybe that doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.
From a driver's standpoint, I like new race tracks. It's fun going somewhere new and trying out a brand new place. It's fun trying to figure it out, how to set the car up, how to handle the turns, how to find the line. It's kind of neat to go somewhere where your beard doesn't have to be gray and you don't have to have a notebook with a couple hundred pages and notes back to the Curtis Turner days to figure a place out. Everybody is on a pretty even level, at least from an experience standpoint. And, hey, it was pretty cool seeing Wayne Newton walking through the garage a year ago. Deep down, we all know we need to be running places like Las Vegas. For some guys, maybe you have to dig a little deeper down to find that realization, but we know we have to be doing this. If we’re going to keep the sport growing and we’re going to keep moving forward, we need to be in these kinds of markets. It goes beyond just, say, Mobil 1, but it involves every sponsor of every car in the whole series. What’s good for them is usually pretty good for the rest of us too. I don’t know how much they think about marketing and new markets in other sports. Maybe basketball players don’t care much about San Francisco or football players don’t think that much about south Florida or whatever. For racers, we know we have to think about marketing a lot. We’re a growing sport and if we’re going to keep on growing, we have to keep up with that. I don’t know of anybody in stock car racing who is willing to sit back and just let things be. If you aren’t moving forward, you’re moving backwards. And everybody in stock car racing wants to be moving forward. Of the 100,000 people or so who go there to see the race and maybe spend a couple of days extra, they are coming from all over the country. It's not just people who live in Las Vegas. I think you're reaching a cross section of population through that race alone. That’s important not just to Las Vegas but to Mobil and to every sponsor in the series. Because of that, it is vitally important to the race teams as well. We’re growing and we can’t afford to sit still. Maybe other sports can, but nobody in stock car racing thinks that way. Here’s hoping they never will. Jeremy Mayfield heads to Las Vegas fifth in Winston Cup points after finishing 11th at Daytona and seventh at Rockingham. His is in his third season driving for Penske-Kranefuss Racing on the Winston Cup circuit. His column appears weekly on CNNSI.com.
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