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Different places Looking forward to the trip to Las Vegas
In a lot of ways, the weekend at Rockingham seemed longer than the two weeks at Daytona. Even though we were there just two days -- a new, shortened schedule NASCAR is trying at some tracks this year -- it seemed like a long time. Everyone's thoughts were on Dale Earnhardt, obviously. The loss was a big one for everybody, personally and professionally, and it will be a long time before we get over that loss. Even then, we will never forget him. That was pretty obvious over the weekend at Rockingham. For us, we're trying to put Rockingham behind us as a race team. A problem with the clutch and a broken axle later just put us way behind the eight-ball. I was ready to get out of Rockingham and move on down the road. And Las Vegas is a pretty good place to move to. I'd guess just about every driver would tell you the same thing. The most important race of the season is always the next race and your favorite track is always the one where you run the best. 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 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 out -- 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 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 of notes dating 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. That pretty much explains things from the competitive side, but we all need to be doing a lot of thinking from the business side of things too. We need to be racing in Las Vegas, just like we need to be racing in Chicago and Kansas City this year. And we need to be in Dallas and in Los Angeles and near Miami and all of those other big markets we race. If we're going to grow and if we're going to be recognized, those places are crucial to what we're doing. That doesn't mean we need the big markets at the expense of the smaller ones. Keep in mind that television has carried us into homes all over the country, whether we were racing in Atlanta or in Martinsville. The things that CBS, ESPN and TNN were able to do for us were fantastic. Now with FOX and NBC carrying us on major network television on a regular basis, we're able to do a lot of things we weren't able to do before. 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. Jeremy Mayfield is in his fourth year driving the Penske Racing No. 12 Ford. His diary will appear weekly on CNNSI.com in 2001.
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