‘Roll Tide’ given new meaning at racetracks

Before leaving for Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Friday, I made a checklist of things I might be needing while watching the NASCAR Sprint Cup drivers practice and qualify for Sunday's Kobalt Tools 400.

Earplugs? Check.

Stopwatch? Check.

One of those giant "We're No. 1" foam fingers with pictures of Brewster Baker and his entire "Six Pack" -- including the lovely Diane Lane -- on front? Check.

Tide to Go instant stain remover pen? Check.

Wait a sec. Tide to Go instant stain remover pen? You betcha. Based on what happened at the Daytona 500, you never know when one of these NASCAR beat guys from Winston-Salem is going to drop ashes from an unfiltered Camel onto your pit notes and set them ablaze.

You remember what happened at Daytona. First there was rain, for like two days, and then there was fire, with 40 laps to go, when something broke on Juan Pablo Montoya's car and it slammed into a track dryer during a caution period, dumping a 200-gallon river of jet fuel onto the track.

The fuel ignited, turning Turn 3 into something resembling Chicago, circa 1871, after Catherine O'Leary's cow kicked over that lantern in the barn, at least according to the urban myth.

Anyway, there was this serious conflagration. And by the time it was brought under control, there was a heck of a mess, like when one wakes up at Charlie Sheen's place.

The NASCAR track crew used some of the most high-tech solutions known to man to clean it all up. We're talking space-age polymers. We're talking NASA seal-of-approval stuff.

OK, so I exaggerate, ever so slightly. We're talking soap and water.

Specifically, Tide laundry detergent and water. And not some industrial-sized tub of Tide in a 55-gallon drum. This was Tide in the 50-load box, the kind you buy off the shelf at Albertsons or the Smith's or, if you've just rolled into town from one of the Southern states, Piggly Wiggly or Publix.

During a break in the action Friday -- i.e., when Danica Patrick wasn't practicing for today's Sam's Town 300 Nationwide Series race -- John Bisci of the LVMS publicity staff placed a 40-load box of Ultra Tide at my work station, purchased at the Walmart on the corner of Nellis Boulevard and Craig Road. He said 750 more pounds of it, as per NASCAR's edict, was stored in 55-barrel drums at two locations on the speedway grounds. Only the stuff in the drums was unscented.

Apparently, the track cleanup crew can tolerate only so much April freshness.

"All of us around here knew that Tide could save your favorite shirt from a ketchup stain," said Sarah Pasquinucci, external relations manager for Procter & Gamble Fabric Care, Tide's parent company. "We did not know it could save the Daytona 500."

And now everybody, or at least everybody who was watching Sunday's race from Phoenix, knows it, too.

It took the Procter & Gamble people four days to put together a TV commercial showing how much stronger than dirt -- or whatever the Ajax folks claim -- Tide is.

(In another weird happenstance, Montoya is driving a car sponsored by Clorox this weekend, and he hit the wall on his first practice lap Friday.)

The Tide TV spot shows a track worker reaching for the three boxes of suds on the back of an emergency vehicle after the inferno and then cuts to a shot of another track worker spreading it across the track with one of those contraptions used to apply weed killer to your lawn when you have crabgrass.

"You keep inventing stains," flashes the graphic on the screen. "We'll keep inventing ways to get them out."

The commercial ends with NASCAR play-by-play guy Mike Joy's call of the track cleanup on Fox.

"Whatever it takes," Joy says in a voice that suggests he can't believe what he just saw, like when Dennis Eckersley grooved that pitch to Kurt Gibson in the 1988 World Series.

Darrell Waltrip was flying the Tide colors when he won the Daytona 500 in 1989, and Ricky Rudd turned the 1997 Brickyard 400 into another soap box derby. But not even those victories created this much buzz, which has given "Roll Tide" a new meaning.

One might say that Tide is cleaning up on the competition. And that after pretty much getting out of the racing business, the Tide has turned, thanks to Montoya's prime-time wreck and a cameraman who couldn't believe what he was seeing, either.

OK, that's enough of that.

Well, almost anyway.

On the day we spoke, Pasquinucci mentioned in passing that the Tide Loads of Hope mobile laundromat was en route to Henryville, Ind., whose residents had lost most everything, with the possible exception of the shirts off their backs, in deadly tornadoes.

So Tide washed those shirts for free. On Wednesday, in fact, it did 389 complimentary loads of laundry for the people of Henryville, who had lost so much, who had lost most everything, except for hope.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.