Tuesday, Feb. 24, 1998 | 9:38 a.m.
I KNOW ALL you race fans are excited about Sunday's inaugural Winston Cup race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, but the Elvis car is the big thing for us in Las Vegas. Hey, the race track is a race track and, yeah, I'm excited about coming to Las Vegas and all of that stuff but the Elvis car is really something special.
My Miller Lite Ford is going to have a larger-than-life image of Elvis on the hood with a gold guitar on the side panels. We'll debut the car in Sunday's Las Vegas 400 and we don't plan to run it again this year, so this will be a one-of-a-kind deal.
I'm known as NASCAR's biggest lover of rock 'n' roll so it's extremely flattering to be able to carry the Elvis paint scheme on my Miller car and into our sport.
How this all came about was Fred Wagenhals, the CEO of Action Performance, called me up at the Waldorf Astoria in New York as my wife, Patti, and I were in our room getting ready to go downstairs for the Winston Cup Awards banquet. He said, "Man, I've got this great opportunity. I just brainstormed this and I called the guys from Elvis Presley Enterprises and we all got hooked up and here's is what we want to do."
By putting Elvis on my car, they want to try to grow the Elvis Fan Club and try to grow the popularity of NASCAR and try to make this thing a home run for everybody. They wanted to paint my car up and paint John Force's NHRA dragster up and do a big Elvis thing. I said, "OK, keep talking," and after he got done I said, "Man, this really sounds good, the fans are going to love this deal."
We talked with Miller Brewing Company, my sponsor, and they thought this was a neat thing. They said, "The fans will love it, it'll be exciting, it'll be good promotion for us and it'll be good for NASCAR." Hopefully we can get more NASCAR fans for Elvis and get more Elvis fans for NASCAR.
So, we talked to the brewery and they said, "Cool," we talked to Mr. Penske, our car owner, and he said, "Cool," and we were off and running. We painted a special car up and we went down to Memphis in January and announced it down there with me and John Force. We unveiled both our cars and the people just loved it.
Miller Brewing is just going to go completely hog-wild promoting this thing in Las Vegas; I'll be real busy when I'm here. We're going to have big billboards up with me driving the car and they're going to have Elvis in the car next to me. "The Adventures of Rusty" is what it's being called. We'll also be at the Flamingo Hilton this week, hanging out there, and we'll be doing special promotions and we'll have show cars out there.
All these new things grow the popularity of NASCAR racing. The fans are just dying for memorabilia and we do good on that part. All the Elvis die-cast cars -- they made thousands and thousands of those Elvis Presley die-casts and they sold out. They sold every one of them right out of the box. It's been so huge I can almost go out on a limb and say it's darn near the most successful promotion in the United States.
With a big picture of Elvis on the hood and gold guitars all up and down the side of my car, I'm sure you won't have any problem picking me out of the pack come Sunday afternoon.
archive
