Age restrictions will keep Las Vegas teen Noah Gragson from Daytona

Usually when a birth certificate is doctored for the sake of sports, it’s so a kid can play in Little League for one more season. Usually when a DOB is fudged upon, it’s to make a young pitcher seem even younger. Such as that Danny Almonte kid from New York, who is now 28. Or 29 or 30.

 

But after recently driving practice laps around refurbished Daytona International Speedway, Noah Gragson said he gave semi-serious thought to doctoring his certificate of birth to make him appear older.

 

Young Gragson trekked to the historic speed temple to see if he could handle an ARCA — which stands for Auto Racing Club of America, a Midwest-based series often used as a springboard to NASCAR — stock car at a high rate of speed.

 

He could.

 

Now he wants to run the Feb. 13 ARCA race on the big track that is part of Daytona Speedweeks.

 

He can’t.

 

He’s only 17. He’s not old enough.

 

“I want to run this race so badly,” the speedy Las Vegas teenager said. “It just didn’t work out.”

 

Welcome to Kyle Busch’s world, Master Noah.

 

In 2001, the reigning Sprint Cup champion, who also is from Las Vegas, was fastest in practice for a NASCAR Truck Series race at Fontana, California, on the undercard of an IndyCar program. Busch was only 16. He was banished from further racing that weekend because of some convoluted rule regarding the IndyCar race being sponsored by Marlboro.

 

Shortly thereafter, NASCAR put in its own rule stating a driver must be 18 to go 'round in circles in one of its three touring series, regardless of whether free cigarettes were handed out at the turnstiles after coolers were checked.

 

So now young Gragson, who won two races in the K&N West Series last year driving for Jefferson Pitts Racing and was named rookie of the year, will have to bide a little more time before he races at Daytona and the other superspeedways.

 

These were his observations after circling those high banks at 190 mph-plus with Mason Mitchell Motorsports teammates.

 

It was awesome.

 

It was awesomely fast.

 

But he said at first he thought “a monkey could do it” because all you have to do with a restrictor plate in place is mash the pedal to the metal and steer.

 

It was only when he hooked up in a draft with other cars that he got an inkling of the challenge of Daytona, of how one has to position himself to make moves when one’s car is twitching nervously in a high-speed vortex.

 

Gragson last weekend also finished a confidence-boosting fourth in a late-model all-star race at Watermelon Capital Speedway in Cordele, Georgia, in which Busch and some other NASCAR types were entered — there’s a Twitter pic that shows Busch’s car spinning off a rudimentary track lacking a guardrail on its far side.

 

Busch’s car careened through a creek and came to rest in a watermelon patch for which the track down there is named.

 

Young Noah Gragson managed to stay out of the watermelon patch. He said after his birthday in July, the plan is to run a few NASCAR Truck Series races as a totally legit 18-year-old.

 

 

Las Vegas Motor Speedway has been ranked No. 3 among the 23 NASCAR tracks for “best natural scenery” by Lawnstarter, a lawn care and mowing service based in Austin, Texas.

 

This gives credence to two schools of thought:

 

1. The landscaping people at LVMS have green thumbs and are to be applauded for making the place aesthetically pleasing (although they can’t take credit for the desert sage framed by a natural backdrop of mountains).

 

2. There are entirely too many NASCAR-inspired lists.

 

Lawnstarter called Phoenix International Raceway “a desert flower” in naming it the most scenic of the tracks. Auto Club Speedway in Fontana was slotted No. 2 despite once having a smokestack from an old steel mill growing out of the infield.

 

 

• When NASCAR veteran Brendan Gaughan of Las Vegas received a phone call and was asked what he was doing on Saturday, he didn’t think it meant all day Saturday. And part of Sunday. Gaughan, a late addition to the BAR1 Motorsports lineup, helped the endurance racing team finish third in the vaunted prototype class in the Rolex 24 at Daytona. It was Gaughan’s second podium drive in the celebrated 24-hour race; in 2011, he was part of the winning team in the undercard GT3 class.

 

• Logan Punch, the football-playing son of pit lane reporter — and former Las Vegas Bowl play-by-play broadcaster — Dr. Jerry Punch, will try out for the Tennessee football team as a preferred walk-on as a long snapper. Logan’s old man was a backup quarterback at North Carolina State under Lou Holtz before he became an emergency medicine physician and interviewer of mostly disgruntled drivers on pit road.

 

• The Challenger, Contender and Eliminator Rounds no longer will be called that when NASCAR begins its playoff races after football season starts. No, they won’t be called Legends and Leaders, as per the Big Ten’s former divisions. From now on — or until the next time the wind blows — the Chase for the Sprint Cup segments will be known as the Round of 16, Round of 12, Round of 8 and Championship Round, which seems both generic and self-explanatory, and would have been a good idea in the first place.