Kurt, Kyle Busch help NASCAR win advertising game
While NASCAR continues reinventing itself to look like the NFL on wheels, there's at least one area in which stock car racing seems to have inched ahead of pro football on the high side.
I speak of the commercials and online videos and photo ops being used to promote its Big One.
On Sunday, NASCAR will open the season with its Super Bowl, aka the Daytona 500. (Leave it to NASCAR to hold its biggest event at the beginning of the season instead of at the end.) The commercials and videos I've seen exhibit lots more imagination than the Don Draper-types who were working the recent Super Bowl.
In a greater upset than Derrike Cope winning Daytona in 1990, none feature Danica Patrick or sexy cops or sexual overtures.
Two feature the Busch brothers from Las Vegas, because the Busch brothers will do just about anything you ask, which is what makes them so cool. Even if they do get booed a lot by NASCAR fans at the Southern tracks.
The one with Kyle Busch only features his car. The NASCAR championship-winning No. 18 M&M's Toyota was taken to New York City and parked in conspicuous places, after which dozens of parking tickets were placed on the windshield and a boot on the front tire.
It was sort of art imitating life again — in 2011, the younger Busch received a speeding ticket in North Carolina, for driving 128 mph where the signs said one should keep it under 45.
The one featuring Kurt Busch was filmed during the recent NASCAR Goes West media event in Hollywood, California. A man from Yahoo Sports bets the former Sprint Cup champion an In-N-Out burger and a chocolate milkshake (Kurt Busch's favorite meal) if he can beat the time Waze, an app for cellphone users, says it should take to navigate from wherever they were to the In-N-Out Burger in Westwood near the UCLA campus.
I'm not going to tell you if Busch won the bet, because then I'd have to put up one of those spoiler alerts with an asterisk. But you can see for yourself below.
The best of the videos shows a NASCAR Sprint Cup car on one of those "breaking news" highway chases you often see on cable news. The car is No. 24. A couple of TV talking heads speculate about what the viewer is seeing in the helicopter shot in a totally believable, airheaded fashion.
The No. 24 car finally is surrounded by law enforcement authorities as it pulls into the Fox studios. A familiar face gets out.
If you follow stock car racing and have memorized all the numbers and have kept up on recent driver retirements, you can probably guess who it is.
Anyway, this commercial was much better than the disturbing "puppymonkeybaby" one that received major notice after Super Bowl 50, if you ask me. Watch it below.
Locals do Daytona
The Busch brothers aren't the only local drivers who will be running around in circles at renovated Daytona International Speedway this weekend. Las Vegas will be represented in both major warmup races, too.
First up is today's NextEra Energy 250 Truck Series lid-lifter, in which Spencer Gallagher will drive the No. 23 Allegiant Travel Chevrolet. Maury Gallagher Jr., Spencer's old man, owns the truck. His other job is CEO of Allegiant Air.
On Saturday, veteran Brendan Gaughan will get behind the wheel of the No. 62 South Point Chevy for legendary car owner Richard Childress in the Powershares QQQ 300, which is what they're calling the Xfinity Series opener.
Gaughan also drove a limited eight-race Sprint Cup schedule in 2015. He recently said he's through spinning his wheels in NASCAR's top tier unless somebody wants to put him in competitive equipment.
Green-white-checkered
• Former Las Vegas Motor Speedway Bullring racers Noah Gragson and Riley Herbst finished sixth and ninth in the NASCAR K&N East Series opener at New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Young Gragson, 17, was profiled in this space two weeks ago; even younger Herbst, 16, received a shout-out last week. The race, won by Herbst's 15-year-old teammate Todd Gilliland, will air on NBCSN at 8:30 p.m. Thursday.
• Andretti Autosport has announced that Butterball Turkeys will return as a sponsor on the cars of 2014 Indy 500 winner Ryan Hunter Reay and Marco Andretti during the 100th running of the 500-mile race on Memorial Day weekend. Many auto racing observers (and lots of rival drivers) believe Butterball Turkeys would have been an ideal sponsor of Jimmy Spencer's car when he was competing in NASCAR.
• It was announced this week that Sunday's Daytona 500 is a sellout for the first time in many years. Part of that is because of the track having undergone a fabulous face-lift. And part of it is thanks to track capacity having been reduced from 146,000 to an estimated 101,000 before the bulldozer drivers started their engines. That's the part that wasn't mentioned in the news release.
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. His motor sports notebook runs on Friday. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski
