I was talking to a non-racing friend last week, and the topic of my pending flight to Las Vegas for the SuperNationals came up. He was jealous, citing all the things that he’d love to do in Sin City. That’s when I let them know that like all of my past visits to Vegas, it’s a ‘work trip’ and not focused on ‘fun’. It’s not about shows, gambling, and sitting by the pool. It’s about racing. I then offered up my usual line of realistic insight into life on the road in motorsports…

“It’s not a vacation. It’s just another airport, then its hotel, track, dinner, hotel, track, dinner, hotel, track, dinner, on repeat until you get to go home to prep to leave for the next race”.

If you’re a karter or in the motorsports industry, you probably get it. It’s the life of a motorsports nomad.

The 2025 USA season comes to an end at the SKUSA SuperNationals 28 returning to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway (Photo: On Track Promotions – otp.ca)

As we all know, a day in karting begins before sunrise and continues until well past sunset and, if all goes well, the team will then pour into whatever restaurant is still open for a late dinner. Thankfully, Las Vegas doesn’t really close down, and if it does, it’s usually quite late. That said, while Las Vegas is overrun with entertainment and culinary hot spots, it’s still just a race city for me, with a couple of unique competition venues over the years, great hotels, and tremendous restaurants. So like I said…’hotel, track, dinner, sleep’…and do it all over again. And the fact that I personally feel that Las Vegas is indeed a ‘race city’ for me got me thinking about how important of a place it actually is for American karting.

I think I’ve been to Las Vegas around 40 times over the last almost 30 years; 28 of those excursions now being for the SKUSA SuperNationals. Many other programs have brought me to this outpost of extravagance in Nevada. Add in the Stars of Karting series, IKF Region 7, WKA Constructors Championship, and the unique HPV Pro Invitational at Buffalo Bills out in Primm in the late 1990s and 2000s and, most recently, ROK Vegas at the Rio, and Las Vegas truly is a ‘racing city’ in my world, not a vacation destination.

Every time I’m at the airport waiting to board my flight south for the SuperNationals, I begin to get nostalgic. I think about the unique venues we’ve raced at, starting with the Las Vegas Karting Center which was located outside the city right alongside I-15 near Sloan. These days, the city’s sprawl has all but reached what was once a 15-minute drive past the Silverton. I can still picture pulling off the highway, curling under the overpass and into the track and I can still hear the sound of the karts riding over the outside curbing at start-finish. It was unmistakable. The SuperNationals started there in 1997 and the five-year run at the venue before SKUSA brought the race into the Rio in 2002 was raw and real.

Rio hosted the SuperNationals in 2002, 2003, 2008-2014, 2018, 2019 and 2022

We were out in the desert and we raced deep into the cold Saturday nights running under less than adequate lighting. Shifterkarts were relatively new to the sport and the guys running them were ‘outlaws’, if you will. We were at the forefront of a new wave of excitement for American karting. The entire event was just a bunch of really cool guys and girls getting together out in Las Vegas to bang gears. It was new and exciting, and everyone knew they were part of something special. Superkarts! USA was a relatively new organization owned by Don Janowski and steered by Jim Murley at the time, and they both had the belief that shifterkart racing was a sport in and of itself. They wanted to take shifterkart racing big-time. The track out in Sloan was fast and physically demanding, and as the race grew in stature, the importance of winning and the pressure to get the job done increased exponentially.

SKUSA bringing the SuperNats into the Rio in 2002 truly changed everything, taking the sport to the next level. The sport was now within the Las Vegas city limits with an amazing backdrop and live coverage on HDNet, and subsequent events at Sam Boyd Stadium, a return to the Rio, and then the Las Vegas Convention Center continued to build the event’s legendary status. The necessary move out to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2021 has simply added another chapter to the race’s history. And, to be real, it also added another chapter to the legacy of the city of Las Vegas as part of American and global karting.

Whatever the future looks like, the SuperNationals has to happen in Las Vegas. No question about it. So where will the SuperNationals be hosted in the coming years? Will SKUSA be back at LVMS in 2026 or is a return to the Rio in the cards? Can another hotel or sports venue be acquired in the city to host the sport’s most iconic event? This all remains to be seen and only the inner circle at SKUSA likely knows.

The future may be an unknown, but the history of Las Vegas as a ‘karting city’, from SKUSA to the IKF, from the WKA to the Stars of Karting, is well documented. Las Vegas is a jewel in the crown of American karting, with over three decades of race results and memories to prove it.

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