NASCAR’s good, bad, ugly and the haboob at Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS, NV - MARCH 06: Matt Kenseth, driver of the #20 DeWalt Toyota, leads the field during a sand storm over the track the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Kobalt 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on March 6, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images)
LAS VEGAS, NV - MARCH 06:  Matt Kenseth, driver of the #20 DeWalt Toyota, leads the field during a sand storm over the track the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Kobalt 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on March 6, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada.  (Photo by Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images)
LAS VEGAS, NV – MARCH 06: Matt Kenseth, driver of the #20 DeWalt Toyota, leads the field during a sand storm over the track the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Kobalt 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on March 6, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images)

The desert is supposed to be place of calmness, serenity, and tranquility… and dry.  If you watch Westerns, the sky is always blue and the world is always dry. Sure it rains, but very little.  In fact Vegas is the only large city in the US to average less than an inch of rain for every month of the year. The odds are (pun intended) then that most days in Vegas will be dry ones. In fact it would be a pretty good bet that a day in Las Vegas will be dry one.

That wager Sunday however would have resulted in a losing bet. There was rain in the morning, but it wasn’t the rain, it was mostly gone by race time and only delayed the start of the race for some 25-minutes. No the worst thing was the wind. Not a gentle cooling breeze wafting around the infield mind you but an all-out, hurricane force batten down the hatches, ladies hold on to your skirts, type of wind. There were gusts of over 50 miles per hour and they wreaked havoc on everyone in attendance.  That is except the US Air Force Thunderbirds whose flyover went off without a hitch, because they are jets, going several hundred miles per hour and they are shaped like rockets, so…

All that wind put a great deal of trash on the track, but it also helped dry the surface pretty quickly.

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Greg Engle
About Greg Engle 7421 Articles
Greg is a published award winning sportswriter who spent 23 years combined active and active reserve military service, much of that in and around the Special Operations community. Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.