Columnist Rusty Wallace: Fun comes with Las Vegas race

Rusty Wallace

Monday, Feb. 25, 2002 | 11:21 a.m.

Rusty Wallace, driver of the Miller Lite Team Penske Ford Taurus, is writing daily column exclusively for the Las Vegas Sun in conjunction with Sunday's UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

As hard as it is to believe, it's almost March, we've already run two Winston Cup races and we're ready to race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway again.

I say this every year but I mean it: I really love coming to Vegas. There's so much cool stuff to do away from the racetrack that it's really different from almost any other track we run during the course of the year.

And, believe me, we're going to have a good time just like we do every year. My wife Patti and I left for Vegas today, but we're not going directly to Vegas. We're going to stop off at Telluride, Colo., and do some snowmobile riding on the way out there and spend a couple of nights at a nice resort.

Patti and I worked really hard after last year was over trying to work on a schedule for this year that would give us more time together and right off the bat, stuff starts piling up on me. We're trying to find some more time to make this 36-race thing a little bit more palatable.

So we were sitting at the house one day before we went to Daytona and I said, "Hey, we love riding snowmobiles and we have to fly right over Colorado on our way to Vegas, so why don't we go out early and stop in and do some snowmobile riding."

The off-season was really short but we did manage to do some fun things to wind down from last season. We went skiing in Idaho and we went on a Carnival Cruise -- that was a real neat deal. We had 1,180 Rusty Wallace fans on that ship and it was fabulous; they were all big fans.

We did question-and-answer sessions, we did autograph sessions and we did photo sessions. It was cool going to Cozumel, Mexico, and Grand Cayman and all I saw was Rusty Wallace T-shirts wherever I went. Carnival Cruise Line gave each cabin two T-shirts so all 1,180 people had Rusty Wallace shirts on all day long for the whole damn cruise. It was amazing.

Some people would think that's not really a vacation because I'm answering questions and signing autographs, but the people were so nice to me. They really gave us our time together and we enjoyed it. The real getaway was when we went diving; that was fun.

We also spent a little time up in the North Carolina mountains, which was cool, but it just seems like the off-season came and went. I can't believe I'm right here again ready to race in Vegas because it seems like we were just in Loudon finishing up the 2001 season a couple weeks ago.

I'm really looking forward to writing this column for the Sun each day leading up to the race. We've got a lot of really cool functions going on this week and some exciting appearances that I'll tell you all about in tomorrow's column.