When NASCAR president Mike Helton presented Johnny Benson with his champion's ring and the trophy Monday night in Florida, it represented the changing of the guard in NASCAR's Truck Series. With original title sponsor Craftsman Tools bowing out at the end of the season, and Camping World preparing to take its place in 2009, the season-ending awards banquet signaled the end of an era.

"From humble beginnings, racing SuperTrucks on short tracks and road courses to the first race on the high banks of Daytona, this series has grown into one of NASCAR's most exciting series," Craftsman spokesman Mike Cassar said. "Over our 14-year span, we've crowned 10 different champions and have been proud of watch many of our series stars go on to become great heroes of NASCAR.

"Thank you to our partners at NASCAR, the drivers, teams and officials who have worn the Craftsman logo with pride. And finally, thank you to the fans who have supported the Craftsman Truck Series."

But it's difficult not to write the final chapter in Craftsman's story without going back to the beginning, in early 1994. Four off-road racing enthusiasts somehow talked their way into Bill France Jr.'s Daytona Beach office with what seemed to be a crazy idea: What about racing trucks on paved tracks?

Having brought a prototype truck with them to Speedweeks, Dick Landfield, Jimmy Smith, Jim Venable and Frank "Scoop" Vessels not only got France to listen, but he was convinced that with the right promotion -- and the right sponsor -- the idea could work. And he knew just the person to put in charge of the project: Brian France.

"The four guys who brought the idea, the concept, to NASCAR got an audience with Bill France Jr.," said NASCAR's Owen Kearns, who has been involved with the Truck Series from the beginning. "He signed off on the deal, but at that time Brian was sort of working his way through the company on the West Coast, learning how to be a short-track operator and learning how tours operate. Bill felt this was a great opportunity for Brian to actually take a role in a project.

"Brian went out and sold the sponsorship and put together a complete television broadcast package, which had never been done in NASCAR to that point. Essentially, from an executive standpoint, it was Brian's series."

The NASCAR SuperTruck Series by Craftsman was about to be born. Demonstration races were held that summer in California, Oregon and Arizona. And three non-points races at Tucson were nationally televised during the winter months, as NASCAR enticed Cup owners into give the series a try.

"The series actually kind of morphed from mid-summer of 1994 on through some Winter Heat races at Tucson Raceway Park, prior to the first season getting under way," Kearns said. "That was good, because quite candidly, I'm not sure what we would have had in terms of trucks for that first race. Opening off-Broadway was a good idea."

A total of 33 trucks took the green flag in the Skoal Bandit Copper World Classic at Phoenix International Raceway on Feb. 5, 1995, and nobody really knew what to expect. Ron Hornaday took the pole, and Mike Skinner passed Terry Labonte in the final turn to win -- instantly creating a pair of precedents that continue to this day: fresh faces and fantastic finishes.

"Of course, they didn't have the seating at Phoenix that they do now, just the front straightaway, so probably that crowd was no larger than what we had a couple of weeks ago," Kearns said. "But the fact that we had Richard Childress, Rick Hendrick, Dale Earnhardt and several other Cup teams involved gave it instant credibility.

Year	Champion	Top Rookie
2008	J. Benson	C. Braun
2007	R. Hornaday	W. Allen
2006	T. Bodine	E. Darnell
2005	T. Musgrave	T. Kluever
2004	B. Hamilton	D. Reutimann
2003	T. Kvapil	C. Edwards
2002	M. Bliss	B. Gaughan
2001	J. Sprague	T. Kvapil
2000	G. Biffle	Ku. Busch
1999	J. Sprague	M. Stefanik
1998	R. Hornaday	G. Biffle
1997	J. Sprague	K. Irwin
1996	R. Hornaday	B. Reffner
1995	M. Skinner

"If you look back at the pictures of the trucks back in 1995, like the old saying goes, it looked like they threw away the truck and kept the box. They were flat in the front, flat in the back and like a brick. But when the series was first conceived, nobody had any idea that we were going to race Daytona. The longest tracks during the first year were the race at Milwaukee and the two races at Phoenix, and everything else was fifth-eighths mile or below."

Fourteen seasons later, Hornaday and Skinner are still fixtures on the circuit. And Kearns said that was part of the allure for drivers who didn't have the connections to climb the ladder to Cup in those days.

"I guess you'd have to say it was a West Coast-conceived series, but the whole idea behind the participants was to first, try to bring in some of the off-roaders and introduce them to NASCAR," Kearns said. "And second, back in the mid-'90s and before, the top echelons of NASCAR were pretty insular. And if you didn't race a Late Model at Hickory, you probably weren't going to get a [Busch Series] ride and you certainly weren't going to get a Cup ride unless you had proven yourself in that series.

"What this did was open up NASCAR to a whole group of different faces, whether it was the [Winston West] Series, whether it was off-road, road racing, open wheel, sports cars, you name it. Over a span of five or six years, we transitioned away from those kinds of drivers, but if you look back at some of the names in the series, we've had Indy 500 winners, Formula 1 drivers, endurance drivers, even a champion motocross rider."

The schedule was mainly a collection of short tracks, three road-course races and the miles at Milwaukee and Phoenix, Kearns said.

"The concept behind the series was to take the thrill of NASCAR national series racing to places that would never have the opportunity to have other races," Kearns said. "In 17 or so instances, that was the case."

After the first full season, Craftsman officials were convinced and signed on as series sponsor, a relationship that existed up until the end of this season. But Kearns said the mainstream media was harder to win over at first.

"I think all of us kind of held our breaths," Kearns said. "We thought it was going along pretty well, but you kept hearing this undercurrent, especially from some of the Southern media folks and others, saying 'This is a fad. It'll be here a couple of years and then it'll be gone.' And I think there was still that concern.

"Then Roush Racing got involved in 1996 and Richard Petty came along, and that pretty much guaranteed that the series would grow. I think if we had stayed at the short-track level, particularly just on the West Coast, I think the series probably would not have progressed. I think people saw early on, 'Yeah, we've got it off to a great start, but now we've got to start looking at the long-term and the bigger picture,' which was why they added Homestead-Miami Speedway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway and gradually went up to the bigger tracks."

Perhaps the greatest positive that has come out of the formation of the Truck Series has been the idea of innovation. Designing a brand-new racing chassis for the trucks and incorporation state-of-the-art safety features led NASCAR to later consider a research and design facility in North Carolina, which eventually resulted in the chassis used by Cup Series teams today.

Ron Hornaday and Jack Sprague

NCTS Champions

Driver	No.	Year(s)
R. Hornaday	3	1996, 1998, 2007
J. Sprague	3	1997, 1999, 2001
J. Benson	1	2008
G. Biffle	1	2000
M. Bliss	1	2002
T. Bodine	1	2006
B. Hamilton	1	2004
T. Kvapil	1	2003
T. Musgrave	1	2005
M. Skinner	1	1995

"NASCAR is probably an organization that over 60 years, has been steeped in tradition," Kearns said. "And major change is not going to come overnight. But the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series represented a completely fresh sheet of paper. No tradition whatsoever. So you could try just about anything. I think we were able to take a look at things and say, 'Hey, you know what? This is going to make the racing better.' "

In addition, NASCAR used the Truck Series to test new rules. One that found its way to the Cup Series was the green-white-checkered finish. But another fell by the wayside after the first few seasons.

"We tried things that didn't work at all, like the halftime breaks," Kearns said. "But that was good when we first started, because teams could not afford to bring 10 or 12 guys. We had some guys with three or four crew members back then, and one of those was the owner. When we first started live pit stops and only five guys over the wall, you had crew chiefs actually jacking trucks and changing tires.

"We found through focus groups, that the NASCAR fans wanted to see pit stops. Well, you couldn't do pit stops at some of the race tracks we went to. And they didn't have enough seats as the series grew. So it kind of evolved to where it is today."

If there was a red-letter day for the Truck Series, it might have been at Daytona in 2000. Mike Wallace beat Andy Houston to the flag in the inaugural 200-miler, a race that featured a record 31 lead changes. The series continued to add larger venues throughout the next decade, running at places like Talladega, which would have seemed unfathomable in 1995.

In addition to the close finishes and tight championship battles, one of the legacies of the Truck Series will be its drivers. Kearns is proud of the fact that many of NASCAR's current stars first cut their racing teeth at that level.

"From a personal standpoint, it's the drivers who have come up through the series," Kearns said. "Kurt Busch became a Sprint Cup champion. Carl Edwards, Greg Biffle and others have had success along the way. Jack Roush was probably the first Cup owner to seriously consider a farm system and if you look at how strong his organization is today, with the type of driving talent he has, that shows the validity of the concept of the series."

Only one of the original four off-road racers stuck around long enough to see their dreams of a national truck racing series become a reality. Jim Smith won the 2005 Truck Series championship with Ted Musgrave behind the wheel.

When Kearns looks back on the growth of the series from that winter day in Arizona, he is amazed -- and rightly so -- that the crazy idea pitched to Bill France Jr. 14 years ago has become one of NASCAR's brightest achievements.

"Probably we're proudest that we had a national company like Craftsman come in and take something that was totally unproven on an assumption that it would get bigger and stuck around for 14 years," Kearns said. "That was big, because without the support of Craftsman, the series would probably not have prospered. It probably would have withered away."