Sixteen years of rubbin’ and racin’ at LVMS

And just like that, NASCAR Cup-style racing is about to turn Sweet 16 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and so it can be said that, yes, John Fogerty was right: Big wheels do keep on turnin’.

“Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo ...”

Actually, the doo-doo-doo part was Ike & Tina Turner’s interpretation of Fogerty’s lyrics. Fogerty was mostly about leaving a good job in the city, workin’ for the man ev’ry night and day, etc. It was Tina and her miniskirted backup singers/dancers known as the Ikettes that put the horsepower, the fuel injection, into “Proud Mary.” In that way, they were much like Jimmie Johnson’s pit crew.

Sixteen years of rubbin’ and racin’ and waitin’ in long lines of traffic? Can this be possible?

To put it into perspective, or at least into terms to which today’s NASCAR fans relate, when the Cup series debuted at LVMS in 1998, Danica Patrick wasn’t wearing eyeliner. She was a mere lass of 14, racing go-karts in Wisconsin.

Mark Martin won the first Cup race here in 1998, when the series still was known as Winston Cup and came with a warning from the surgeon general.

Martin still is racing today. Martin probably still will be racing when NASCAR at LVMS turns 25, and when it turns 50, because he is to auto racing what Dick Clark was to “American Bandstand.” He never seems to age.

As for the rest of the starting field that day, Jeff Gordon and Bobby Labonte still are rubbin’ and racin’ full time on NASCAR’s highest level, too.

Jeff Burton, who finished second in the inaugural Las Vegas 400 — then won it the next two years — is rubbin’ and racin’ part time (22 races of the 106 or so scheduled).

Ken Schrader, Terry Labonte, Michael Waltrip and Joe Nemechek still slide behind the wheel for the odd Sunday drive. Labonte and Waltrip won’t be in Las Vegas this weekend. Schrader still will slide behind the wheel of practically anything that moves, and not just on Sunday.

Rusty Wallace, third in the first Cup race here, works the ESPN broadcast booth. One year at the Indy 500, he got really excited and told his audience that a thrilling race to the finish was the greatest Daytona 500 he had witnessed.

Rounding out the top 10 on what then was a flatter Las Vegas 1.5-mile oval, before the corner banking augmentation, were Johnny Benson Jr. (pretty much retired), Jeremy Mayfield (suspended indefinitely after testing positive for methamphetamine in 2009), Ted Musgrave (retired), Jimmy Spencer (TV commentator), Dale Earnhardt (killed at Daytona 500, still mourned), Bill Elliott (pretty much retired) and Chad Little (pretty much director of the Camping World Truck Series).

The following finished one lap in arrears on March 1, 1998: Rick Mast, Ricky Rudd, Geoff Bodine, M. Waltrip, T. Labonte, Dick Trickle, Gordon, Ward Burton, B. Labonte.

Bobby Hamilton, Schrader, Kyle Petty, Robert Pressley, Sterling Marlin, Greg Sacks, Brett Bodine and Ricky Craven finished two laps back; Kevin Lepage, Mike Skinner, Ernie Irvan, Derrike Cope, Lake Speed, Jeff Green, David Green and Darrell Waltrip, ol’ D.W. hisself (as Larry McReynolds might say in the TV booth), were three laps down. Followed by the late Kenny Irwin Jr., and Nemechek, each four laps back.

For all I know, Wally Dallenbach Jr., Steve Grissom, Dale Jarrett, John Andretti, Kenny Wallace and Waymond Lane “Hut” Stricklin of Calera, Ala., who finished 38 through 43, are still out there. Especially Stricklin, who married Donnie Allison’s daughter and drove the Circuit City car.

Jimmy “Smut” Means did not attempt to qualify for the first NASCAR Cup race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. He retired in 1993 and was last seen at a Waffle Shop near Huntsville, Ala., in 1999.

(Actually, Means still has a race team, called Hamilton-Means, which failed to qualify for the recent Daytona 500 with Brian Keselowski behind the wheel.)

These were men of speed, each and every one, even if in the case of some — such as Steve Grissom, for instance — it took looking up the box score and typing their names to be reminded of it.

But 16 years ago, when Danica Patrick was 14 years old and driving go-karts, these were the men who were rubbin’ and racin’ in the desert — not the Phoenix desert, or the desert near Riverside, Calif., and the famous road course there, but the Las Vegas desert. There must have been 100,000 people in the grandstands and maybe half that many again stuck in traffic, and they were standing and yelling woo-hoo!

The ones on speedway grounds, anyway.

And when the cars of these men of speed hurtled toward the green flag for the first time, you couldn’t hear the people in the seats yell woo-hoo! or much of anything else over the roar of the engines. You could, however, see a lot of little hairs standing straight up on the backs of a lot of thick necks, because Las Vegas had never seen anything like it.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.