McMurray's karting days rekindled with new hobby

Motorsports, just like baseball, football and soccer, has participation levels including everything from kids to professionals. And in motorsports, the largest entry-level form of the sport is karting.

But unlike baseball or football, where Major League Baseball and National Football League players don't go back to Little League and Pop Warner to get their thrills, karting provides that for motorsports professionals.

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Just ask Roush Fenway Racing driver Jamie McMurray. A week after he finished third in the Cup Series season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, McMurray was out in Las Vegas for one of the biggest karting events of the year, the 12th annual Superkarts! USA SuperNationals.

And the coolest thing, by far, is that a high-performance kart is the great equalizer when it comes to competition.

Unlike an MLB pro going back to Little League and tearing a pitcher's head off with a line drive, or even more literally breaking bones in a collision on the line of scrimmage, a young teenager can easily handle a race-winning professional driver.

Again, just ask McMurray. Fourteen-year-old Brendan Phinny put a whipping on him.

And put former Indy 500 winners Buddy Rice and Dan Wheldon, IRL racer Memo Gidley and Grand-Am standout Michael Valiante on your speed dial, too. They were all losers in Vegas -- and we're not talking on the tables.

It was a 90 mph, seven-tenths-mile circuit laid out in the parking lot of the Rio Hotel and Casino. McMurray had spent more than a decade in his youth plying the highways and byways of the USA racing karts before he graduated to professional racing. His return over the last couple years has been a re-awakening of what he really loved about the sport, as well as an eye-opener.

The sport of karting is a definite technical exercise, as well as a physical one. And unfortunately, as in every other facet of motorsports, it's also a financial challenge.

But if you ask veteran Sprint Cup driver McMurray to give you the 411 on karting, which is motorsports in its most basic form, you'll also get right to the root of why anyone would ever think about getting involved in the sport: It's just plain fun.

"When you get to the level we're at in professional racing, it becomes work -- sometimes we forget about why we fell in love with it," McMurray said. "The bottom line is, we do this because it's fun. A lot of times in our sport, we turn it into work, but doing something like [karting] makes you love it again and remember how passionate we are about it."

Even at the SKUSA SuperNationals McMurray might've questioned the fun quotient, especially when he ran down into the first turn of his TaG Senior class heat race -- where he was part of a 95-kart entry -- and the next thing he knew, "I had wheels torn off, suspension parts broken and all kind of other problems." (Continued)