Gaughan sees Kansas track as home away from home

Wednesday, May 30, 2001 | 10:55 a.m.

When the Las Vegas Motor Speedway opened in the fall of 1996, NASCAR Winston Cup Series driver Mark Martin was among the first drivers to test at the brand-new facility.

After taking a few laps around the 1.5-mile superspeedway, Martin said that anyone considering building a speedway should use LVMS as a model.

Apparently, the folks at International Speedway Corp. took Martin's advice.

The new 75,000-seat Kansas Speedway opens this weekend with ARCA RE/MAX and NASCAR Winston West Series races. Las Vegas native Brendan Gaughan, the defending Winston West champion, said the new facility reminds him a lot of his hometown speedway.

"It's a beautiful place -- they did a really nice job," Gaughan said of the new 1.5-mile tri-oval. "It's almost identical to Las Vegas (Motor Speedway).

"The only thing I noticed is that it seems to have more turn and less straightaway (than LVMS). Turn 4 has the same characteristics as Vegas and so does Turn 2."

The banking in the turns at Kansas Speedway is 15 degrees, as opposed to the 12-degree banking at LVMS, but Gaughan said he couldn't tell the difference between the two tracks.

"It really isn't that much of a difference," Gaughan said. "They say it's 15 degrees and Vegas is (12), but there really isn't any difference."

Just as it did before it granted LVMS a Winston Cup Series race, NASCAR is using this weekend's races as a dress rehearsal for the inaugural Winston Cup race at Kansas Speedway in late September. Before landing its first Winston Cup race in 1998, LVMS hosted both the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and a stand-alone Busch Series race.

Gaughan logged about 1,000 laps on the Kansas track last month as an instructor for the Richard Petty Driving Experience and said he hopes that experience -- combined with his knowledge of LVMS -- will give him an edge on the competition in Saturday's race.

"Being the hometown Vegas boy, we're thinking that with that many similarities between the two tracks, we should do fairly well there," Gaughan said. "We're taking the same car that we won Fontana with and we're going there with the same mind-set as we have the last couple of races."

After a slow start this season, Gaughan rebounded with two wins, a third- and a fourth-place finish in his past four Winston West starts and moved into second place in the series points standings, 43 points behind Mark Reed.

"We've been running real well lately and we've got some good momentum going into this race," he said.