Today’s trophy girls as classy as they are sexy

Thanks to these new Generation-6 stock cars, there is an extra day of NASCAR practice at Las Vegas Motor Speedway today, to get them dialed in here. I would arrive early not to beat traffic, but because hearing an auto racing engine at full song reverberate off cavernous and mostly empty grandstands is one of sport’s simple pleasures.

If you grew up in someplace like Lakewood or Euclid or Parma Heights, or one of the other Cleveland suburbs, and your dad took you to an Indians game when they were truly lousy, and you heard the crack of a Louisville Slugger echo at yawning old Municipal Stadium — and you can multiply by about 100 — then you know what I mean.

People who never have heard Jimmie Johnson search for a few tenths on a midweek morning, never have heard Leon Wagner take batting practice when the Tribe trailed the Yankees by 24½ games in the standings, won’t know what I mean. Invariably, before NASCAR weekend is over, I will hear from some of these people, and they will ask “What’s the point?”

And I will think of an NBA game between the Kings and Timberwolves and ponder asking them the same question. But I won’t, because like Ned Jarrett, I am a gentleman and something of an ambassador for the sport of auto racing. And so I will just say I enjoy the speed and the colors and the abject assault on the senses, and the way fried chicken smells in the infield.

For a lot of people who enjoy auto racing, that’s the point.

And were it not for auto racing, ESPN’s Joe Lunardi wouldn’t be referring to Iowa State and Temple and Villanova and Tennessee as “bubble” teams for the NCAA Tournament, because that is an expression that came from auto racing, from the Indianapolis 500, where drivers who posted the slowest qualifying times for the 500-mile race were said to be “on the bubble.”

And were it not for auto racing, the Bulls and Lakers would not have sprayed champagne in Phil Jackson’s eyes, and gotten it all over his finely tailored suits, because spraying champagne after a monumental triumph originated in auto racing, too, at Le Mans in France in 1967.

That was the year Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt drove a Ford GT40 — American muscle, baby — to victory in the famous 24-hour race, and so the French dignitaries handed Gurney the giant bottle of sparkling wine on the winner’s rostrum — and he didn’t know what to do with it, because Gurney was a teetotaler. So he shook up its contents, jammed his thumb into the flagon and hosed down everybody within shouting distance of the Mulsanne Straight.

Were it not for auto racing, too, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders might be posing for car parts calendars and the cover of Iron Horse magazine, because auto racing was using pretty girls as window dressing since before the advent of the forward pass, sideline TV cameras and Irv Cross.

They’d find a pretty girl sitting in the bleachers, and she’d be wearing her Daisy Dukes, and they’d ask if she would be willing to knot her blouse at the bottom and kiss the winner of that night’s 50-lap feature race, a guy with grease under his nails called Rapid Roy or Fast Eddie, who usually owned a Conoco station in town.

I think this might have been how Pam Anderson got her start, because they now race stock cars up in Canada, too.

But the NASCAR trophy girl, sort of like those Gen-6 cars, has undergone an evolution. Two weeks ago at the Daytona 500, two women wearing firesuits posed with a big check after the qualifying runs. From a distance, it was hard to tell which was Danica Patrick and which was Miss Coors Light.

Rachel Rupert, 27, has been Miss Coors Light since 2010. She wouldn’t have gotten the job if she wasn’t attractive; she wouldn’t have been interested in it, she says, if it required wearing Daisy Dukes and knotting her blouse at the bottom and posing with her sidepods exposed, like Linda Vaughn, Miss Hurst Golden Shifter, did during Richard Petty and Mario Andretti’s day.

Rupert wears a firesuit zipped to the neck, like the drivers, and she waves the green flag at the start of Nationwide and Sprint Cup qualifying. And when qualifying is over, instead of kissing the fastest driver, she interviews him (or her). Like Erin Andrews at football games, she’s practically a member of the media.

Years ago, Jeff Gordon married one of the Miss Winston Cups, and though there’s nothing in writing about fraternizing with the drivers, Rupert doesn’t do it, because she said that would be more tacky than new right-side tires.

“My job is more on the media side, to connect the sport back to the fans,” she says, though when pressed, she will admit to Tony Stewart playfully trying to grab her rear spoiler now and again when the photographers snap their picture together. But that’s just Tony being Tony.

She also said she gets along famously with all three Miss Sprint Cups, who also wear firesuits. But to answer the question she most often gets asked at Talladega, no, she has never mud-wrestled them.

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