Riley Herbst’s stock car education continues on, off track

At 18 years old, Riley Herbst of Las Vegas still has much to learn about driving stock cars.

During the recent ARCA awards banquet in Indianapolis, for instance, he learned he could benefit from a spotter off the track as well as on.

On the morning after pocketing $10,000 for being named the 2017 ARCA Rookie of the Year, Herbst woke early to catch a 7:55 flight back to Las Vegas.

It turned out his reservation was for 7:55 p.m.

“If anybody knows some cool places in the Indy airport, hit a kid up,” he wrote on his Twitter account with the hashtag #needtokill12hrs.”

The short off-season for the promising teenager ended Wednesday. He was on an airplane for Charlotte, N.C., and then it’s on to Daytona where he will test the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 18 ARCA Toyota on Wednesday in preparation for his baptismal on the 2.5-mile high banks during NASCAR Speedweeks.

The Midwest-based ARCA Series will kick off its 66th season on Feb. 10 with the 55th running of the Lucas Oil 200. This year, Herbst plans to race in it. Last year, he was too young — by six days.

His car owner had asked for a special dispensation so Herbst could race at Daytona as a 17-year-old. ARCA said no. Apparently it has been a while since Joe Gibbs last won the Super Bowl.

Troy Herbst, Riley’s father and one of the famous off-road racing Herbst brothers, said Riley still was putting the finishing touches on his 2018 schedule but is set for a full season with Gibbs in ARCA after finishing fifth in points in 2017 and winning on the big track at Pocono, Pennsylvania.

Green, white checkered

— Kyle Busch Motorsports has signed a new development driver whose name conjures an image of a hockey goaltender. Raphael Lessard is a 16-year-old Canadian from Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce, Quebec. He will contest a part-time schedule of about 20 races in one of KBM’s late-model entries. Lessard hopes to follow in the tire tracks of other young guns who have driven for Busch on their way up the NASCAR ladder such as William Byron and Erik Jones from the Cup Series and Christopher Bell, who will be an Xfinity Series rookie in 2018.

— Construction projects at Las Vegas Motor Speedway that will transform the NHRA drag strip from two lanes to four and the main grandstand of the big NASCAR oval into a viewing nirvana for race fans with discretionary dollars to spend are on schedule. I’m told the tearing down is complete, to be followed by the building up.

— A Wisconsin man who has built a street legal Indy car has put it up for sale on Craigslist. He’s asking $89,995, and apparently has targeted Las Vegas for a prospective buyer because of our lenient laws regarding street legal Indy cars or something. But don’t get any crazy ideas: If they can’t scrape together 33 cars for this year’s Indy 500, the street legal Indy car would not pass tech inspection and therefore be ineligible to fill out the field, even if Danica Patrick were driving it.

Contact Ron Kantowski at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow @ronkantowski on Twitter.