Friday, July 12, 2002 | 10:44 a.m.
There was a time when it appeared Rob MacCachren would become the first Las Vegas native to make it big in one of NASCAR's national touring series.
Already considered one of the best off-road racers to come out of Las Vegas, MacCachren in 1994 was one of a handful of drivers tabbed to drive in four demonstration races for what would become the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.
Because of a lack of funding on the part of his team owner, Jim Venable, MacCachren was relegated to the sidelines when the series debuted the following year with a 20-race schedule. In ensuing years, MacCachren has watched former desert racers Robby Gordon and Jimmie Johnson achieve stardom on the NASCAR Winston Cup Series.
And that's just fine with the 37-year-old MacCachren, who will be co-driving a Class 1 buggy with John Marking of El Cajon, Calif., in Saturday's inaugural SCORE Henderson's Terrible 250 Desert Race.
"In the end, I really didn't have the passion for it like I did off-road, so I didn't push (Venable) to go do it," MacCachren said. "A lot of people say, 'Wow, you should have done that -- there's Robby Gordon and Jimmie Johnson and these guys who were off-road guys are in there doing it now and you should have done that.'
"I don't think I would have really enjoyed (racing on ovals). I like doing what I like doing and I don't think I would have been having any fun. I didn't have the passion to do it, so I didn't follow through. Nothing is like off-roading, where you can jump, slide, roll over, land back on your wheels and keep going."
MacCachren, who last year won an unprecedented four off-road series titles and was named to the 2001 All-America Auto Racing Team, has a drastically reduced schedule this season. A dispute with the Championship Off-Road Racing (CORR) series, which runs primarily in the Midwest, led him to drop out of the series prior to this season after winning 11 of 18 races in 2001.
"They made the shocks on my truck illegal," MacCachren said. "In the last two years, we won 60 to 70 percent of the races and they weren't happy about that. I was the only one who had the type of shocks that I had, so they figured that was a way they could make me stumble, or trip me a little bit.
"It's in the rulebook -- if somebody is dominating or they feel has an unfair advantage, they can do something about it. So, if I fixed my truck and went back (this season) and kept winning, they could do it to me again. It was like, 'Hey, I'm not taking this.' "
Because MacCachren didn't pull out of CORR until April, it was too late for him to put together a program for the SCORE series, which started in January and already had run two of its six races.
So instead of the hectic 33-race schedule he ran last year, MacCachren is running Southern Nevada Off-Road Enthusiasts (SNORE) and Best in the Desert races while trying to get the funding to run a new truck in the CORR series next season. In the meantime, he said he would race in the SCORE series whenever the opportunity presents itself.
"That's what I'm doing this weekend," MacCachren said of his co-driving status with Marking. "I drove with him in the Baja 500 (in June) and we were winning overall, and with about 100 miles to go, the input shaft in the transmission broke.
"So I guess that (run) got everybody kind of fired up and they invited me to come drive again with them to try to get that overall win that we thought we should have had at the last race."
Not that MacCachren, who owned his own team in the CORR series, would mind running more than the occasional race if the circumstances were right.
"If I could race every weekend, I would," he said. "With more support and more help from sponsors, it can be done. It's not hard to drive a racecar every weekend, it's hard to put everything together ... the organization is the tough part.
"If you have people dedicated (to doing those things), you could do it. I would love to race four or five series a year, but you need a lot of people and a good plan."
As is the case with the nearly two dozen other Southern Nevada racers competing in this weekend's inaugural Henderson, MacCachren said he is excited about the new event and hopes to have a hometown advantage in the 251.1-mile race.
"I'm real excited about it; I think it's going to be a great race," he said. "I ran SNORE races that started right up there where this race will start, so I'm pretty sure I've been around all of the course before at one time or another."
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