SHOOTING STARS: Speedway tracks NASCAR TV coverage

  Just a little touch of star quality.
  That’s what NASCAR newcomer Danica Patrick (pictured) brings to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway this weekend.
  The IndyCar-turned-NASCAR driver isn’t even competing in NASCAR Weekend’s premier event — that would be Sunday’s Shelby American Sprint Cup race, to be televised on Fox, where hometown hero Kyle Busch is the defending champ.
  Instead, Patrick will race in Saturday’s Nationwide Series, the Sam’s Town 300, to be featured on cable’s ESPN2.
  In making the jump from IndyCar to NASCAR racing, Patrick “has become her own personal media machine,” according to Jeff Motley, Las Vegas Motor Speedway’s vice president of public relations. “She has star quality — and not everyone does.”
  The Sam’s Town 300 will be Patrick’s third career NASCAR race, he notes, “and she’s not going to race again until June,” so interest will be high for her Las Vegas track debut.
  Cable’s Speed Channel also gets into the act, Motley reports, with practices for both races and Sprint Cup qualifying runs. And KVVU-TV, Channel 5, “will be doing a one-hour Saturday night show.”
  Overall, “there’s a lot of ancillary programming — talk shows, studio interviews,” on radio as well as TV, to prep racing fans for NASCAR weekend, Motley says.
  It all adds up to more than 15 hours of coverage — and “a lot of national TV exposure,” Motley comments.
  After all, every time cars zoom around the track, viewers — and more than 100,000 racing fans watching the race in person — see “Las Vegas USA" on the wall, he points out. And every time there’s a break in the action, “a shot of the Strip or some interesting off-Strip icon” gives Southern Nevada another “chance to showcase itself for the TV cameras.”
  Poker faces: Before focusing on Saturday’s Sam’s Town 300, ESPN2 will be at The Venetian for a different kind of competition: the new North American Poker Tour. ESPN2 begins airing 16 hours of coverage in April.
  Created by PokerStars.net, the tour has a $5,000 buy-in to attract thousands of players on a circuit that stretches from the Caribbean to New England — to, of course, Las Vegas.
  In addition to the four-day main event at The Venetian, which continues through Wednesday, there’s also an Invitational High Roller Bounty Shootout tournament Tuesday through Thursday.
  With a $25,000 buy-in, the Shootout features 36 poker stars (Phil Hellmuth (pictured), Daniel Negreanu, Antonio Esfandiari and Barry Greenstein among them) battling for a spot at a winner-take-all final table. Each player will have a bounty on his head and the player who collects the most bounties wins an additional $100,000.
  Coverage also will feature one-on-one player interviews and a variety of celebrity participants, including Christian Slater, Brad Garrett and new Planet Hollywood headliner Jason Alexander. Model and “Dancing With the Stars” contestant Joanna Krupa hosts the tournament telecast.
  The Venetian proved an ideal Las Vegas site for the tour because “we were looking for a strong partner — and The Venetian has a fantastic poker room,” says PokerStars spokesman Matt Clark. “We hope to add more Vegas stops along the way.
  There’s more poker on the table next week when NBC’s “National Heads-Up Poker Championship” returns to Caesars Palace; as always, stay tuned to Shooting Stars for the real deal.
  Good census: U.S. Census forms are scheduled for delivery in March.
  But a public service announcement encouraging Nevadans to fill out (and mail back) their census forms is scheduled to shoot this week at Charleston Heights Arts Center.
  The PSA — titled “How Many?” — features a 6-foot, Nevada-shaped container, filled with marbles. And let’s not forget the kids, who will guess how many marbles fit into the Nevada-shaped container.
  That container was fabricated by the local design and fabrication firm E.gads, reports production supervisor Vikki Henry. Doug Momary directs the PSA, which is being shot and edited by Las Vegas-based Laguna Productions.