The Daily News Leader from Staunton, Virginia • 25

The Daily News Leader, Thursday, December 23, 1999 B9 jmilffffflfc 1 agister your 1 meVl mam and comments vote 6 Mario Andretti and comments on What is the www.thatsracin.com. 5 Uj 1 hi I Ui iU huh Last week we asked: most important who do you consider thing to a to be the U.S. driver Hrivpr of the century? luivcis There were 16, 373 success? votes: JU Hi I i lt 7 i i 3 SPORTS -1 I ''tiy' fft David Pearson None of the Above rn ftJ Sam Bass combines lifelong passion for NASCAR and painting 1 V' J) Sam Bass By David Poole Knight Ridder Newspapers hen Sam Bass was growing up in Virginia, one of his favorite parts of the year was stock-car racing's off-season. "I would spend that time in the off-season drawing up cars how I thought they would look," Bass recalls. "Then, when the Day-tona broadcast would Jr- M.

'-5r3T t3f J-- A TS Jl 1 ji A'T third involved Dale Earnhardt, who Bass says has been a big supporter of his work over the years. When Earnhardt agreed to drive a special paint scheme for Wheaties cereal, Bass designed the car. He also did a painting of Earnhardt for the promotional part of that campaign, and that portrait was put on the Wheaties boxes that were stocked on grocery store shelves. "I know I will never wind up being on a Wheaties box, but it was special to be involved in that," Bass said. Bass loves both parts of his career, the painting and the car design.

He does about 20 to 25 original paintings a year, with each one taking him at least 80 hours to complete. Many of his paintings feature layers of detail mat are sometimes not immediately apparent. In a painting done after Alan Kulwicki won the 1992 Winston Cup championship, it's easy to miss at first glance a subtle reflection in the bell of the championship trophy Kulwicki is holding up. The reflection is of the Mighty Mouse cartoon character, a mascot Kulwicki's team adopted during its run to that title. "A lot of things I do with reflections are things I think of as I am working on the painting," Bass says.

"I will realize there's an area here or there that could use something, and it would be neat if the shadow cast here formed something. The only frustrating part of his work, he says, is the deadlines. He's busiest from August to February, as teams begin planning their new looks for a new season. "I would say between August and February in Daytona, I will work a minimum of 16 hours a day, seven days a week," Bass says. But Bass isn't complaining.

He's still a big fan of racing, and gets a great thrill every time he sees something he has designed on paper turn up on the track as a three-dimensional race car speeding by in pursuit of the checkered flag. "Since Day One of this, I really cared that the drivers knew what a fan I was, that I really cared about what I was doing and that I cared about what they thought about what I was doing," Bass says. "I want to make a good living at doing this, but it's a privilege to be able to do that. The drivers have been very supportive, very gracious and very nice to me. "It's always an honor that people love and enjoy what I am doing, because I am doing it because I love and enjoy it." come on TV, I would be like, 'Oh, so that's how it looks.

Bass still spends a lot of his time drawing up race cars. The difference is that now those drawings are transformed into the color schemes of the cars that roll out when many new teams start racing or when existing teams take on a new look. The rainbow-colored design of Jeff Gordon's No. 24 Chevrolet? Bass dreamed that one up. Tony Stewart's No.

20 Pontiacs? Another Bass design. So are Steve Park's No. 1 Chevrolet, Sterling Marlin's No. 40 Chevy and the No. 8 Chevrolet of Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Bass has turned a childhood passion into a flourishing career. His company, Sam Bass Illustration and Design, operates out of a studio and gallery just a few car lengths outside Turn 1 at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte. The gallery's six display rooms feature nearly 100 of Bass' original paintings of NASCAR racing's greatest stars and most exciting moments. It also includes displays of the more than 75 Winston Cup, Grand National and Truck series vehicles for which he has designed the look. "As far back as I can remember I have always been drawing," says Bass, 37," a native of Hopewell, Va.

"One of my earliest memories is winning an art contest in the first grade with a little picture of a walrus that I drew." Abput that same time, Bass started going to races at Southside Speedway in Richmond with his uncles. He quickly got hooked on racing and began putting his love for art and love for the sport together. Bass took art courses all through school and graduated with a fine arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University. His first big break came in 1981, a year after he graduated from high school. "I got a guard to let me go into the garage area at Talladega and take a painting that I did of Bobby Allison," Bass says.

"I wanted to get him to sign it for me, strictly to bring it home and hang it on my wall. "While I was inside the garage area I had two or three teams ask me to do paintings for them. Driving back home, it just dawned on me that if I could string enough of these things together maybe I could turn it into a career." Bass chuckles now when he remembers that he got $35 apiece for each of the paintings he was asked to do that day. These days, prints of his work sell for between $125 and $350, with the originals worth many times those amounts. Bass' gallery to buy a print as a birthday present for a new driver who had been hired by Hendrick Motorsports.

Bass gave the print to Evernham and asked only that he be given a chance to submit some design ideas when it came time to design a car for Jeff Gordon. "A few months later, when it came time to design the car, Ray remembered me," Bass said. "That gave me my chance, and you just try to make the best of it when you get that chance." The rainbow design that has become one of Gordon's trademarks during his rise to stardom in Winston Cup racing was, for its time, an extravagant paint job for a race car. "I asked them what colors I should work with," Bass says. "They said, "Well, DuPont can make any color, it's a paint That was like a dream come true for an artist." The Allison and Gordon car designs rank as two of Bass' favorite projects.

A In 1984, Bass drove to Charlotte and met with track officials. He was hired to do a painting for the cover of the track's race program for May 1985. He has done the program cover for every Charlotte race since. The car-design part of his career took off a few years later. In 1987, Bass did a couple of paintings for the Miller Brewing which was sponsoring cars driven by Bobby Allison and Bobby Hillin Jr.

Toward the end of that year, Miller asked Bass to design the teams' cars for the following season. "I had been a real big Bobby Allison fan growing up, and that was just an unbelievably neat opportunity to get that chance to do that," Bass says. "I got to design his Grand National car for (sponsor) Piper Aircraft and his Miller car he ran on Sunday. At Daytona, he won both races right out of the box. That was a pretty hard moment to top." In 1992, Ray Evernham came to Bass designed the color schemes for NASCAR drivers Jeff Gordon (No.

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