Motorsports, just like baseball, football and soccer, has participation levels including everything from kids to professionals. And in motorsports, the largest entry-level form of the sport is karting.

But unlike baseball or football, where Major League Baseball and National Football League players don't go back to Little League and Pop Warner to get their thrills, karting provides that for motorsports professionals.

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Just ask Roush Fenway Racing driver Jamie McMurray. A week after he finished third in the Cup Series season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, McMurray was out in Las Vegas for one of the biggest karting events of the year, the 12th annual Superkarts! USA SuperNationals.

And the coolest thing, by far, is that a high-performance kart is the great equalizer when it comes to competition.

Unlike an MLB pro going back to Little League and tearing a pitcher's head off with a line drive, or even more literally breaking bones in a collision on the line of scrimmage, a young teenager can easily handle a race-winning professional driver.

Again, just ask McMurray. Fourteen-year-old Brendan Phinny put a whipping on him.

And put former Indy 500 winners Buddy Rice and Dan Wheldon, IRL racer Memo Gidley and Grand-Am standout Michael Valiante on your speed dial, too. They were all losers in Vegas -- and we're not talking on the tables.

It was a 90 mph, seven-tenths-mile circuit laid out in the parking lot of the Rio Hotel and Casino. McMurray had spent more than a decade in his youth plying the highways and byways of the USA racing karts before he graduated to professional racing. His return over the last couple years has been a re-awakening of what he really loved about the sport, as well as an eye-opener.

The sport of karting is a definite technical exercise, as well as a physical one. And unfortunately, as in every other facet of motorsports, it's also a financial challenge.

But if you ask veteran Sprint Cup driver McMurray to give you the 411 on karting, which is motorsports in its most basic form, you'll also get right to the root of why anyone would ever think about getting involved in the sport: It's just plain fun.

"When you get to the level we're at in professional racing, it becomes work -- sometimes we forget about why we fell in love with it," McMurray said. "The bottom line is, we do this because it's fun. A lot of times in our sport, we turn it into work, but doing something like [karting] makes you love it again and remember how passionate we are about it."

Even at the SKUSA SuperNationals McMurray might've questioned the fun quotient, especially when he ran down into the first turn of his TaG Senior class heat race -- where he was part of a 95-kart entry -- and the next thing he knew, "I had wheels torn off, suspension parts broken and all kind of other problems."

That moment made McMurray re-think his racing weekend, in which he'd entered both the TaG class as well as a shifter class, S3, for his CRG chassis with a 125cc engine mated to a six-speed gearbox.

How technical is kart racing at this level? So much so that McMurray hired a professional tuner, Randy Johnson from Washington State, to tend his equipment. But after the TaG debacle, the men concentrated all their effort in the 43-kart class where McMurray qualified eighth.

Jamie McMurray finished second to 14-year-old Brendan Phinny.

“

When I was racing karts in the early- to mid-'90s, it was more of, like, a family hobby. I've gotten back into it in the last two years and it's just blown me away ...

”

JAMIE McMURRAY

But throughout practice he'd been looking at Phinny, and noticing something that's not just unique to karting.

"All you see on the kart is another guy in a [driving] suit and a helmet," McMurray said, his voice beaming like a smiling ray of sunshine. "But when we came off the track after practice and went to the scales and [Phinny] took off his helmet, he looked like he was 12 years old. Of course, it turned out he was only 14."

In their final race -- a 30-lapper -- McMurray finished second to his younger rival, only 0.150 seconds behind.

The whole experience got McMurray thoroughly fired up for his next karting excursion, to Daytona International Speedway of all places. The irony of that is two-fold. McMurray's last Cup Series victory came at Daytona in July 2007, and for a decade of his youth, Christmas consisted of "opening presents and then jumping in the truck to pull the karts to Daytona."

"When I was racing karts in the early- to mid-'90s, it was more of, like, a family hobby," McMurray said. "I've gotten back into it in the last two years and it's just blown me away -- the professionalism of it and how far the organization of it has come. The amount of money that people are attracting and that they're putting into go-kart racing is incredible.

"It's a lot of fun, but the teams [out in Las Vegas] have 18-wheelers they're pitting under. It's just incredible."

But it can be just what you make it. And that's why McMurray is so excited about this year's post-Christmas trip. The McMurrays, father and son, raced together in Daytona last winter, but the dynamics were totally different.

"I got somebody to drive my stuff down," Jamie said. "And I just flew down in my jet. This is going to be different, and I'm really, really excited about it. I've got a new truck and trailer, and we're driving down together."

It's going to give them a long trip to swap a few tales. And once they arrive, McMurray said that in the almost total lack of NASCAR testing next year, Daytona's Kart Week will take on even more significance.

"With testing cancelled, there's going to be more than two months in which we'll basically be out of a race car," McMurray said. "It doesn't sound like much, but every year when we had a chance to test it was an opportunity to get re-acclimated to being in the race car again. Being able to race the karts will make up for that a little bit, because kart racing is incredibly physically demanding."

McMurray also acknowledged it's emotionally rewarding.

"This is going to be so cool for me to do this because we did it as a family for so many years," McMurray said of a conversation he had with his fiancée, Christy Futrell. "I told Christy that for me, it was almost going to be like being a kid again. It's a chance to feel the excitement we did when we rode down to Daytona right after Christmas."

And believe me, it brings up the excitement level for the kids he's racing with -- and sometimes only trying to beat, believe it or not.

"Karting, for the most part, is a sport that's done by younger people, with a lot of kids 16 and under," McMurray said. "It's cool to me, and I can't really get over it, but when I'm racing my kart, they'll come up and look at me, and look at my name and say, 'Are you really Jamie McMurray?' They just don't believe it, and sometimes, neither do I."

And that extends onto the race track after the checkered flag flies, too.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.