| | Rick Mast will do almost anything -- even cut through your backyard -- to make a race, and nobody in NASCAR is better at
finishing one.
It wasn't Mark Martin, Tony Stewart, or even Winston Cup
champion Dale Jarrett still there at the end of every race last
season. Counting the first two races of 2000, Mast has been running
at the end for the last 36 times out.
"I'm proud of the streak," Mast said. "We've been real fortunate to be able to stay out of trouble and not have anything
break on our race cars. It's a testament to the quality of race cars and the effort that my guys have put in preparing them at the
shop and at the race track."
|  | | Rick Mast has finished 36 straight races -- the longest current streak in Winston Cup. |
Equally impressive is Mast's ability to make every field, no slam dunk in second-tier cars hardly a match for the powerful
Yates, Roush, Gibbs and Hendrick teams that dominate the sport.
But Mast nearly missed a race a year ago in Las Vegas, where the circuit races again Sunday in the Carsdirect.com 400. Five hours
before the race last year, Mast put the key in the ignition of his rental car to start what should have been a 30-minute ride to Las
Vegas Motor Speedway.
Silence.
"It was as dead as a doornail," Mast said of the car's battery.
By the time help arrived and got him under way, 70 minutes were wasted, and it was 7:10 a.m. The drivers' meeting was scheduled for 9:30 a.m., and missing it would mean starting from the rear of the
field, a loss of 21 positions.
But Mast wasn't worried -- until he got to the interstate. Jammed. And Las Vegas Boulevard was also a parking lot.
"Finally, I realize I'll get to the track at about 1 p.m.," Mast said. That's 90 minutes after they wave the green flag.
So, Mast, who celebrates his 43rd birthday this weekend, put his heritage to good use. Anybody from Rockbridge Baths, Va., should
know something about back roads.
He made great progress, but soon ran out of asphalt. As they say in racing, he had nowhere to go. So he began cutting through
backyards.
"It could have been one of those 'Cops' videos," Mast said. "If only a helicopter had been watching."
But his off-road odyssey didn't escape unnoticed, and he saw blue lights in his mirror.
"It took me four or five minutes to convince him he didn't need to arrest me," Mast said.
A few minutes later, Mast talked his way into an escort to the track. He made to the drivers' meeting just as roll call began.
"I can't pay what this is worth," he told the trooper moments earlier. "He laughed and said, 'This was my chance. I was running
with a NASCAR driver, and you couldn't stay in my draft.'
"I had this little car of mine wide open, and that's all it would do," Mast said sheepishly.
He finished 19th, part of an early season run of top-20 finishes. After that, however, too many finishes in the 30s for
Cale Yarborough's since-disbanded team dropped him all the way to 32nd in the final standings.
Improving on that is the biggest goal for Mast, whose best-career finish in 311 starts was second in 1994 at North
Carolina Speedway. On Sunday, he wound up 33rd at The Rock.
"With the 98 car last year, the performance was there to be in the top 15 in points, and we were in the top-15 through the first
quarter of the year," said Mast, in his first season with Larry Hedrick Motorsports. "Then the sponsor money issue hit, and the
rest is history."
Mast is driving for a one-car team in a series where multicar operations have won the last 43 races, so he knows it would take a
big upset for him to make that most cherished of all left turns -- into Victory Circle. For now, consistency is what he's after.
"I look at that maybe more than winning," said Mast, whose greatest accomplishment was winning the pole for the inaugural
Brickyard 400 in 1994. "There were two or three races last year where I had an outside chance of winning, and that would have been great."
"But we want to get this team to the point where every week when we unload we're just a little bit better than we were the week before."
Now in his 10th full season on the circuit, he has been through plenty. He can give any young driver valuable advice, but this week
it wouldn't have anything to do racing Jarretts, Martins and Stewarts.
"I'd just tell them one thing," Mast said. "Get up and go -- real early!"
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