Columnist Ron Kantowski: Come on feel the noise at speedway

Monday, April 10, 2000 | 9:35 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's column usually appears Thursday. His notes column appears on Tuesday. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or 259-4088.

So this is what listening to Spinal Tap with the amplifiers cranked to 11 must sound -- er, feel -- like.

Having now stood at ground zero at a National Hot Rod Association nationals event, I can sympathize with the roadies who traveled with the fictional rock band in the movies.

Prior to Sunday, the loudest things to which I had been exposed were a Ted Nugent concert (amps set only to "10") and a Mark McGwire foul ball off (name your favorite Chicago Cubs pitcher here). But as you read this, I'll probably still be trying to remove melted foam rubber from my ear canals, the residue of a trip out to Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the inaugural SummitRacing.com NHRA Nationals.

The noise is only half of it. Well, maybe three-quarters of it. Then there are the engines. "Powerful" doesn't do them justice.

There are several professional wrestlers who have become involved with the NHRA, lending their names and faces to the body panels on some of the Funny Cars. At minimum. Some of that juice the wrestling behemoths use to pump up their biceps when combined with STP would make a pretty potent engine additive for these road rockets.

Having never been at Cape Canaveral when the countdown reaches T-minus 0:00 or perched on the San Andreas Fault in the middle of aftershock season, feeling the ground shake under my sneakers was a foreign experience. But I kid you not, the ground actually does shake as the cars leave the launching pad -- er, starting line. The concussion shakes your insides as if they were martini ingredients.

Unless you have stood where I did Sunday -- or interviewed singer Barry White -- you've never felt anything like it.

I have to confess, the last drag race I witnessed prior to Sunday probably was when John Milner put his yellow-green deuce coupe up against Harrison Ford's bitchin' hot rod in "American Graffiti." As the packed grandstands, luxury suites and sponsor decals on the cars suggest, the most elementary form of motor sport has evolved from a rite of passage among shop class veterans and other grease monkeys into a multimillion dollar pastime. Drag racing has moved from a lonely stretch of highway on the outskirts of town into the corporate boardroom.

It should come as no surprise that when it did, Bruton Smith would be waiting outside the door with a pen in one hand and a contract in the other. Smith, who got his first taste of racing in drag when he absorbed the strip at Sears Point a few years ago, built a beautiful quarter-mile on the Bristol Motor Speedway compound in Tennessee last year. But anybody who made it out to the track this weekend will agree that he outdid himself here, especially with the finishing touches.

I mean, when was the last time you saw geraniums growing in the paddock?

Smith spent most of the weekend taking well-deserved bows. And who could blame him? After the pratfalls of his Indy Racing League (not enough fans) and NASCAR Winston Cup events (too many fans), Smith wasn't about to be sequestered in a luxury suite with everything running so smoothly.

Ten minutes before the first pass Sunday he was standing within a few feet of the Christmas Tree at the starting line, with a smile that could light it up.