When Alan Jones pulled into the speedway, his van was caked in different colors of paint, so much that you could hardly tell its original color.

His shirt was equally speckled in a myriad of hues.

"He looked like a hippy and he was unkempt. His hair was long and his shirt had every color of the rainbow on it, but it wasn't tie-dye," recalled H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler, former track president and the man who would hire Jones to paint some signs around Charlotte Motor Speedway back in the late 1970s.

The speedway's beautification budget was scant back then and Jones was Wheeler's way to get some upgrades on the cheap.

A starving artist type from the UNC Charlotte arts program, Jones was first hired to paint the billboard in front of the speedway in exchange for room and board. Wheeler put Jones up in a house he owned behind the track. He painted various signs around the facility but mainly painted the billboard near the main entrance. Beautiful hand-painted murals promoting what was then called the World 600.

"It's funny because if you saw him at the time, no one was going to hire him, but I thought if he had that much paint on his clothes and his van he had to know what he was doing," Wheeler said.

Wheeler was right.

And Jones was just what Wheeler needed to carry out his ultimate beautification project. All the maintenance painting and sign duties would fall to someone else. Wheeler had big things planned for Jones.

"He wanted me to paint grass," Jones recalled. "And when I asked him how to go about doing it he told me I would figure that out on my own."

Similar to the end zones in professional football, Wheeler wanted Jones to duplicate the technique but in the form of logos that would span a wide space in the 6 acres of infield grass.

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Drivers slide through the grass and over the logos painted at Richmond International Raceway to avoid a crash during last season's Nationwide Series race in September.

Lost art

Today, so many painted logos saturate the grassy infields of tracks big and small, the work and stories of how they are created seemingly are lost in the enormity of the racing that surrounds them.

NASCAR fans aren't there to witness the artist and crew toiling away; mixing colors and mapping spaces a week before the event to ensure the logos are bright and vibrant for race day and television.

And hardly anyone gives any thought to when a driver -- skilled or not so -- loses control, spins and tears through the figuratively speaking art gallery of carefully painted logos. Their cars act as lawn mowers across a work of art, a grass painting that likely took someone days to construct.

Once the car plows through the grass, the caution flag flies and the conversation turns to the driver whose car is being towed behind the wall. Meanwhile, the artist watching from outside the track is calculating the additional labor it will take to repair the damage.

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Grass painter Dixon Hucks touches up various spots in the grass prior to the Cup Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway in March.

Part of a painter's job

That's exactly what grass painter and artist Dixon Hucks is doing at Atlanta Motor Speedway early one Saturday morning prior to the Kobalt Tools 500.

NASCAR's Whelen Southern Modified Tour raced the night before and somebody ripped through the 'b' in Kobalt -- a logo that is 250 feet long and 100 feet tall.

It's 7:30 a.m. and the letter must be repainted and ready before the Truck Series begins its first practice.

Hucks -- a 28-year-old artist and glass blower who trained at Penland School of Arts and Crafts -- has a trailer full of paint buckets with long hoses dipped inside. The high-powered sprayers are connected to machines that pump the paint through the hose and out of an adjustable nozzle.

“

... from up in the grandstands people pretty much think we are down here watering the grass.

”

-- DIXON HUCKS

Hucks yells out to his crew to put him in blue paint. He pulls the trigger on the nozzle and a fine but heavy mist of paint sprays onto the grass.

"So from up in the grandstands people pretty much think we are down here watering the grass," Hucks laughs as he points to two other crewmen helping him operate the paint machine.

It's a machine and system operated much like surveying equipment. Each logo is generated on a computer and then graphed on the grass with dots. The artist then connects the dots with a laser like painting tool and fills in the space with the spray gun. The paint used is set-fast paint, the same kind of paint used in traffic marking which dries in 10 minutes. On average, a logo will require anywhere from 60 to 100 gallons of paint at about $30 a gallon.

Barring no foreseeable disasters such as wind, rain or accidents, the average logo will take about a week. But accidents do happen.

"Yeah I have a good story from my rookie year of painting," Hucks said.

Hucks was at Charlotte Motor Speedway two years ago preparing logos for the NASCAR All-Star Race.

"I took off in my truck with the tailgate down and there was a bucket of blue paint and it fell out all over the start-finish line," he said. "They saw it upstairs and sent everybody down, a water truck, the fire truck, everybody. It happened about an hour before the green flag but luckily we got it cleaned up."

Obstacles and accidents were much greater more than 30 years ago when Jones, now 54, first attempted grass painting at Charlotte Motor Speedway. No one had ever painted logos on the grass before, he said, so there was no example to follow and this was a much larger undertaking than painting an end zone on a football field.

And even before Jones and Wheeler could get started, they had to come up with a canvas.

"The first thing we had to do was grow some grass down there," Wheeler said. "We didn't have much grass because this was really when you couldn't borrow any money and I was scrapping along trying to make improvements."

Jones said they did it the hard way for a long time. For one thing they used undersized sprayers, a hand pump at times. The logo, the World 600 globe logo, was measured with rulers and done by freehand.

"I guess you could've used stencils," Jones said. "I never did, I always did it by freehand."

Meaning he did the logo, which was 150 feet long and 100 feet tall, by hand for probably the first 20 races they featured grass paintings, according to Wheeler.

Laying out the logo took about 24 hours, Jones said, and to fill in with spray paint took five to seven days.

So after working out the kinks and getting through the bad weather, in 1979, Jones and Wheeler were ready to show off the speedway's first grass painting, the World 600 logo.

The Tuesday before the race, the competitors were inside the garage and Wheeler went down to chat about the grass.

"I told every single one of those drivers not to go in the grass, I was emphatic about it," he said. "I told them if you run over it you have to re paint it. They took it seriously."

But it didn't stop someone from the Grand National Series coming out of Turn 4 on Saturday from tearing it up.

"I thought oh we'll never have it done ... All these people coming tomorrow. But Alan re painted it and I came out the next morning and it looked like nothing ever happened. From that point on he just did wonderful things and other tracks started copying it."

And that's also how Jones earned the moniker Rembrandt, after the famous Dutch painter.

"He did a wonderful job," Wheeler said. "I thought he was Michelangelo and we were the Sistine Chapel."

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Daytona International Speedway went from not allowing painted logos on the grass 20 years ago to having an estimated 18 this year during Speedweeks.

Prime real estate

As the years went by, NASCAR sponsors realized having the company logo painted on the grass was just as valuable as it was to have it painted on the hood of a stock car. By the late 1990s, everyone wanted to be on the grass and they were willing to pay handsomely for the space.

"Some of the biggest arguments I ever had was about what was going on that grass," Wheeler said. "What I ended up doing, since computers come in, was I had a computer printout one month ahead with who was on the grass and nothing else was getting on. Then a sales person would come to me and say so- and-so has $25,000 to get on the grass. Well, OK, somebody else is going on the grass then."

Today, space on the grass is reserved for entitlement sponsors and official status sponsorships such as the CokeZero 400 at Daytona International Speedway.

Having its branding displayed for thousands of fans and TV viewers usually is included in a sponsorship package and can range anywhere from six figures to $1 million or more.

"Turf logos are roughly the largest brand integration plays in sports allowing our partners to promote their brand to fans at the race and nationwide through the broadcast," said Daryl Q. Wolfe, International Speedway Corp. vice president and chief marketing officer. "Our research has shown that the logos appear more than 50 times on average during a race broadcast providing our partners with high impact and high visibility."

To contrast, 20 years ago Daytona International Speedway refused to allow painted logos on the grass.

"Our grass was always kind of the Holy Grail if you will," said Andrew Gurtis, vice president of operations at DIS.

Daytona prided itself on its pristine and clutter-free signage policy. However, as the sport and its popularity grew so did the number of grass logos sprouting up on the front stretch.

The speedway went from having only one, the Daytona 500 logo, to an estimated 18 this year during Speedweeks and you'll find an average of six during the summer's CokeZero 400.

Still, Gurtis said, "We don't sell the grass as a billboard. You need to sign on as an entitlement to the race or have a large investment in the sport."

Bottom line: The space is limited and high dollar.

So what's next for a track's canvas of grass?

"Flowers," Wheeler said. "What I really wanted to do but never got a chance to do before I left was to make the Coke 600 logo out of flowers. Everyone thought it was a stupid idea but maybe somewhere down the road it will happen."

Until then, track beautification will be left to the painters and not the planters.

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