Captain Gary Davis of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department, took his custom built Chevy S10 Sheriff’s drag racer around to the elementary schools in the county on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
“We are putting on a safety workshop for all the kids in our local schools,” Davis said. “We talk about seat belt safety and bicycle safety, choice and consequences on the dangers of illegal drugs and alcohol use and the importance of staying in school and being achievers in life.”
Other deputies from the department, as well as the local highway patrol, were also on hand with some of the regular police vehicles to show the kids.
“And we’ll talk about drag racing, too, a little bit,” Davis said. When they take a similar program to the high school kids, Davis said they strongly emphasize the idea of racing on the track and not on city streets.
Laura Oslund of Pahrump, with the Nye Communities Coalition, was also present and funded the special T-shirts that were given to all the kids in each of the schools visited.
As a member of the seven-member board of the Nye Communities Coalition, she came to talk about staying away from drugs and alcohol. “Drug and alcohol use might be very thrilling to some people, she said. But if you mess up your mind and your body, you are not able to do the fun things that can take you places in life.”
Oslund explained the Nye Communities Coalition covers all of Lincoln, Nye and Esmeralda Counties and works with all the agencies and organizations in each of the communities in the three counties. “I’m a member of LCAT (Lincoln Communities Action Team), too.”
Davis recently won his class, for the second straight year, at the National Hot Rod Association sanctioned Las Vegas Shootout at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
The racer has all the markings of a Lincoln County Sheriff’s vehicle, including the flashing lights on the top. Davis said he gets many comments just on how the vehicle looks. “It’s pretty popular.”
But it is also fast, covering the quarter-mile track in 8.97 seconds, at 153 miles per hour. The car’s best time has been 8.92. “In racing,” he said, “hundredths of a second can make all the difference.”
