Jeff Olson: Lettuce Prey

West Des Moines, Iowa, Dec. 18 - Random bits of conversation overheard in the pits at dirt tracks across the country last summer:

"Check it out, dude. Croutons!"

"Whoa! Tomatoes!"

"Is it a garden salad or a Caesar salad?"

"I hope that's blue cheese I'm smellin'."

The salad car - a winged sprint car covered with a detailed, larger-than-scale painting of a fresh salad - took Brian Paulus from the fringe of the Pennzoil World of Outlaws Series to the edge of stardom. With his car receiving attention for its paint scheme as well as its results, Paulus placed himself in queue with the current crop of drivers eager to make the move from sprints to NASCAR or Indy cars.

In the case of Paulus, it wasn't an accident. It was all a matter of design, an arrangement as careful as his placement of croutons and tomatoes on the sideboards of a 25-square-foot top wing.

Paulus, a 27-year-old graphic artist whose love for racing temporarily sidetracked his paint-and-brush vocation, could be on the verge of a composition far more important than lettuce on aluminum. In the wake of Ryan Newman, et. al, Paulus is positioning himself to catch the interest of the Roger Penskes and A.J. Foyts of the racing world.

It certainly won't hurt if they just happen to be hungry when they watch him race.

"What's amazing is how much more pull you have with a car that has its own personality," Paulus said. "It was the exact same car we had been running, but before we painted it up like a salad, nobody cared about it. It didn't have its own world. We painted it like a salad, and all of a sudden people are talking about the car. Then, when you run well, people start talking about how fast the salad car is, but it was the same car we'd always been running."

Before it became garden-fresh, the P&P Motorsports/Verdelli Farms sprinter was a simple silver-and-gold car with a white No. 28 on the wing. Todd Fisher, an employee of Lowe's Motor Speedway at the time, suggested to Paulus that he paint the car like a bowl of salad. Paulus, who chose racing over art school, had gained a rep for designing his - and others' - firesuits, helmets and T-shirts. A salad would be a cinch. He designed the placement of the vegetables, and another artist completed the paint job that left people drooling.

"It gave our team an identity," Paulus said. "Mark (Kinser) has the Mopar car, Sammy (Swindell) has the Channellock car and Steve (Kinser) has the Quaker State car. We had nothing. A lot of teams don't have anything. It gave us something. It gave us a base to work from."

It wasn't like the salad car had a cucumber behind the wheel, either. Paulus has been gaining attention for some time as a solid shoe who's made the best of mid-level equipment. He moved from an ambitious beginning in 360ci sprints near his Pennsylvania home to an early splash with the Outlaws in 1996. Since then, he has dabbled in dirt and pavement, racing a part-time schedule with USAC that led to three top-10 finishes in five Coors Light Silver Bullet Series races last season. Next season, the plan is to run more than 90pct of the WoO schedule and eight USAC races.

The future depends on whether influential car owners like what they see. And whether they eat their vegetables.

"I still have another couple of years where I can try to work toward a stock-car or IRL ride," Paulus explained. "Until I get as far as I want to go and decide my limit, I'm not going to settle down. I'm going to keep trying new avenues."

Hoping, of course, that one of them might be paved with ranch dressing and bacon bits. - Jeff Olson, Senior Editor, RACER