NASCAR goes all Vegas-glitzy: a red-carpet gallery

It's not every day that NASCAR gets itself cleaned up for the red carpet -- almost never, matter of fact. So it was quite the shindig in Vegas this past weekend that made NASCAR's finest ditch the firesuits and clean the grime out from under their fingernails.

At the Sprint Cup Championship ceremony, the NASCAR drivers were, by far, the most restrained -- witness Tony Stewart there at right amid a couple of demurely-dressed young ladies.

The ceremony was largely what you'd expect. There were some very cool retrospectives of the season -- I stopped counting the number of Edwards Talladega replays at four -- along with some painfully unfunny "comedy" and some curious music choices. (What was up with the four ladies playing the electro-violins, anyway?)

The drivers each had a few minutes to speak, and they ranged from the casual and relaxed (Stewart, Ryan Newman) to the utterly petrified (Kasey Kahne, visibly sweating and nervous).  Everybody paid homage to Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus, and everybody wished that Jimmie would hurry up and retire. All in all, an enjoyable evening provided you have a high tolerance for non-NASCAR cheese.

But around here, we're all about the cheese ... and the eye candy, too. So we've prepared a little gallery of your favorite drivers and their highly attractive wives and significant others, along with other assorted hangers-on. Enjoy:

   

Top to bottom, left to right: The Johnsons, the Gordons, Denny Hamlin & Jordan Fish, the Sprint Girls; (second row) Joey Logano and Sabrina Simpson, the Montoyas, the Busches, Krista Voda; (third row) the Sprint Girls in their night-on-the-town ensemble, Kara DioGuardi, Aubrey O'Day, Nadine Velazquez, Anne Marie Rhodes.

Click on each photo to expand it, and by all means, snark away.