Officals flag a restart during the Qwik Liner Las Vegas 350 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway Saturday night. There were a track record 12 caution flags in the race won by Mike Skinner.
Monday, Sept. 22, 2008 | 2 a.m.
Qwik Liner 350
Mike Skinner wins the Qwik Liner 350 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
The Chevy certainly played the part, proudly displaying a famous stamped bowtie on the Silverado’s brightly painted grille.
The other manufactures followed suit: Fords, Dodges, even the imported Toyota Tundras had race fans flocking to see what was under their neon-hued hoods Saturday at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Make no mistake: Although the stars of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series are officially “trucks,” these aren’t your Midwest farmer’s pickups.
They don’t even have beds, for crying out loud.
“I think it’s a shell on a rocket,” said Mark Hassel, a race fan from Michigan — who was more interested in watching the inspection of the 3,300-pound machines at the speedway’s Neon Garage than he was arguing over their altered aesthetics.
However, just mere feet away from Hassel sat a dozen of the more familiar off-road vehicles.
Well, maybe familiar isn’t the right word, considering the lifted Dodge looked more like a skyscraper than any Ram one would see passing on I-15.
But even the blacked-out Dodge seemed dwarfed by the earth-toned Chevrolet Kodiak that cast its encompassing shadow close by.
“This is for a certain breed of people,” said a smiling Noel Checo, a salesman at Bill Heard Chevrolet who took great joy in describing the aspirations of the beast of a hauler that comes complete with a 40-gallon gas tank.
“It’s not going to take anyone off the line, but it will get whatever stuff you’ve got to wherever it is you’re going.”
On the track Saturday night a race record 12 cautions slowed the 147-lap event to a snail’s pace. But all those yellow flags also set up one final restart, which saw Mike Skinner snap his winless spell when he squeaked by Erik Darnell by only two-hundredths of a second.
A slew of fireworks couldn’t drown out the roar of the 50,000-plus fans in the stands, which was music to the ears of Series Director Wayne Auton.
“I thought it was a pretty good crowd,” Auton said of the total, which wasn’t significantly lower than those at past races despite the slowing economy and head-to-head time slot against a UNLV football team playing across town fresh off its victory against 15th-ranked Arizona State.
“You look all over the United States at what sports fans are going to see, whether that be football, basketball, baseball or whatever — and it’s the NASCAR racing fans that are still loyal to the sport and are showing up.
“Even in these tougher times, people still want to come out and see great racing.”
The way Ben Kerrigan sees racing, the best competition is right here in the Craftsman Truck Series and not the higher level Nationwide Series or ultra glamorous Sprint Cup Series full of stars such as Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Vegas’ own Kyle Busch.
“Every week there’s a different winner here, every week there’s different people filling out the Top 5,” said Kerrigan, the race engineer for Brendan Gaughan’s No. 10 Ford. “In the Cup Series they’ve narrowed it down to the Top 12 drivers. You don’t hear about anybody else.
“But in the truck series, one day someone could be leading the race and the next week find himself at the tail end of the field. It changes, that’s what people like to see.”
That and the actual trucks (well, if you can technically call them trucks).
“Whatever they are, they’re super fast,” race fan Mike Thompson said, with a hearty laugh.
Andy Samuelson is a sports writer/editor for the Las Vegas Sun. He can be reached at [email protected] or 702-948-7837.
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