Mears, Johnson to play in the sand dunes
By Rea White - Associate Editor
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Hendrick Motorsports drivers Casey Mears and Jimmie Johnson plan to spend today driving a different kind of vehicle.
Before heading into preparations for Sunday's UAW-Dodge 400 Sprint Cup race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Mears and a group of friends plan a little off-road action in the Dumont Dunes, about 100 miles southwest of Las Vegas near Baker, Calif. Mears recently purchased a new off-road sand car, similar to a dune buggy, that he spent much of the offseason driving around the sand dunes.
"The sand dunes are such a huge part of my life, and it's just so much fun that I want everyone to experience it,” said Mears, a native of California. “I just know that there's no way anyone could go out there and not have fun. I want everyone to catch the bug like I have."
Mears has literally been heading to the area almost his entire life. He was just a baby the first time he was at Dumont Dunes with his dad, well-known off-road racer Roger Mears, and mom.
“My mom was holding me in the passenger seat of a dune buggy,” he said. “My dad hit a bump and knocked me out of my mom's arms. I fell on the floorboard and clear down to the nose of the car. They hit the brakes, and when Mom finally got to me I was just waking up. So that was my first experience with the dunes. And it didn't have a negative effect because I still love going."
And he enjoyed the time with his dad. While Mears now recognizes that his dad was a famous off-road racer in the eyes of his fans, he never really thought of him that way growing up.
He just thought about him as his dad. He says that he didn’t realize that other kids didn’t go to races all the time, that his life was any
different from everyone else’s.
“Looking back, my childhood was really cool,” Casey Mears said. “But at the time, it was just normal life.”
Now, though, he recognizes the ways in which his upbringing altered his career choices.
“I'm sure that if he or my grandfather, Bill, didn't race, the chances of me being a race car driver would have greatly decreased,” he said of his father. “But he raised me to be super competitive and to enjoy racing. Now I'm grown up, and it's still just what I do. It's normal life."
