Randy Ricci prays for dry weather on Wednesday, the day he'll drive to Sonoma Raceway to set a world record.
How fast must he go? Oh, Ricci's pursuit of historic achievement has nothing to do with speed.
It has everything to do with passion and breakfast-cereal boxes.
A 60-year-old Santa Rosa native, Ricci runs a pool service to pay his bills. To feed his joy, he follows stock-car racing like Jane Goodall tracks chimps or Copernicus studied celestial spheres.
And the 1972 Montgomery High grad collects all things NASCAR: Photos, miniature cars, autographs, trinkets, any memorabilia evoking the drivers and their muscled machines.
By far, he is proudest of his more than 300 NASCAR-themed cereal boxes.
His favorites?
"Here's one right here," he said, taking hold of a Cheerios box at his home and personal NASCAR museum near Montgomery Village. "It's got Richard Petty's autograph on it."
Maybe 20 of his unopened boxes bear the autographs of race car drivers. Some, Ricci obtained himself at NASCAR races. Others he bought online.
The oldest is the cereal industry's first NASCAR collectible, a 1990 Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats box bearing the likeness of a 19-year-old newcomer named Jeff Gordon, now one of the masters of the circuit.
Ricci recalls spotting the box on the shelf at Santa Rosa's G&G Supermarket and grabbing it almost reflexively. Anything NASCAR.
Since that first purchase, his box collection has grown to 305 - with no duplicates. Ricci has, for instance, the Cocoa Puffs box celebrating the Daytona 500, held Sunday for the 56th time.
Here's a box of Honey Nut Cheerios adorned by Bobby Labonte and the No. 43 Cheerios-sponsored 2008 Dodge Charger. And a box of Corn Flakes with its trademarked Rooster, Cornelius, sporting a NASCAR jacket and helmet. And double-packs of Golden Grahams with toy stock cars inside.
Cereal makers' involvement with NASCAR goes well beyond the colorful graphics and photos of drivers and cars on the boxes. Kellogg's and General Mills, the largest cereal makers, have for years sponsored race teams.
For Sunday's season-opening NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Daytona Beach, General Mills' Cheerios brand co-sponsored the No.3 car, driven by Sprint Cup rookie Austin Dillon.
The car number 3 is a big deal to Ricci and other NASCAR fans because it hasn't been seen on the track since the celebrated Dale Earnhardt died when his car bearing that number crashed at the Daytona 500 of 2001.
NASCAR car No.3 is the property of former racer and current race-team owner Richard Childress, Austin Dillon's grandfather.
Friday was a checkered-flag sort of day for Ricci because he received a shipment of the latest NASCAR cereal box. It's a limited-edition Cheerios salute to the return of the No.3 car to Daytona.
Created through a partnership of General Mills and the huge, Ohio-based Kroger Co. supermarket chain, that box of Cheerios is on sale only at Kroger Co. stores. So Ricci had to order one from a private party.
"I paid $20 for it and the guy sent it to me by two-day mail," he said.
Especially now that he has that box in hand he's ready to apply to the Guinness Book of World Records for acknowledgment of the largest collection of NASCAR-adorned cereal boxes.
He's completed the Guinness paperwork and at about 10 a.m. Wednesday he'll stack the boxes along the Start/Finish line at Sonoma Raceway. Unless, that is, there is rain - that would be a historically bad time and place for soggy cereal.
What the owner of Ricci's Pool Service ultimately will do with his collection is hard to say. Ricci does have a dream: he'd like to see the boxes at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C., even if has to simply donate them.
"I want these somewhere where people can come and have their pictures taken with them," he said. He envisions a great patchwork of cereal boxes amid the memorabilia and artifacts of what he regards the greatest spectator sport on earth.
"This," he said, eyeing his racy Cheerios and Corn Flakes and Lucky Charms packages, "is going to be a piece of art."
(Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.)
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