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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Menard’s Star Shining
RCR newcomer Paul Menard continues to have a career year in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted April 02, 2011   Martinsville, VA
Elliott Sadler will be on stand-by for Paul Menard (Pictured) this weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Sooner or later, the questions are going to stop entirely. Sooner or later, Paul Menard’s on-track success will eclipse the questions he’s asked each week about his father’s sponsorship of his race cars.

It’s close to that point already.

Menard comes into Sunday’s Goody's Fast Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway ranked seventh in points after the first five races of the 2011 NASCAR Sprint Cup season. That puts him ahead of his high-profile Richard Childress Racing teammates Kevin Harvick (ninth), Clint Bowyer (17th) and Jeff Burton (25th).

Whether Menard stays there all season remains to be seen, but there’s no question that he’s stepped up his own game considerably and in the process quickly gained the respect of his teammates.

Friday at Martinsville, Menard was seventh in the opening round of practice and 15th overall in Happy Hour, when he was the fastest of the four RCR Chevrolets.

The best way to deflect those who think Menard only has a ride because he carries Menards sponsorship with him is simply to go fast. And so far this year, he has," said Menard. "You know, people are always going to talk about it, which is fine. Let them talk. I am confident in who I am and what I do, so if they want to bring it up, then shame on them, I guess.”

Menard has the strong support of his team and a great relationship with crew chief Slugger Labbe, who worked with him last year at Richard Petty Motorsports. There is no doubt in the RCR camp that Menard is for real.

“When your name is Paul Menard and your sponsor is Menards, you’re going to take some heat,” said Harvick. “To back that up it kind of silences the critics and the naysayers that say you are just out there having fun. He’s here to race. He wants to win. He’s very competitive and I think he’s been a good fit for our organization with his team, with Slugger and himself.”

In fact, just as RPM helped Roush Fenway Racing when they switched to Ford last year, Menard and Labbe have brought some new ideas to RCR that have helped the entire team.

“Those guys have done a great job,” said Harvick. “Any time you bring in somebody from a different organization with new ideas and a new crew chief and things, I think it has helped our organization to kind of think outside of the box of what we’ve done. I’m happy for him just for the fact that he’s got off to a good start. I couldn’t be happier for the fact that he’s gone out and run good and now he can just concentrate on driving the car and doing the things that he needs to do on the race track instead of having to worry about, not that it bothered him, what everybody else is saying. There’s a lot of pressure with the situation that he came into.”

So can Menard continue the strong start to his season again this weekend at Martinsville?

“Sure as hell going to try,” said Menard. “We have had fast race cars but the neat thing is that at four of the five races we felt like we could have finished better than where we did. We finished 16th at California and we probably would have finished ninth or around there if we didn’t have a caution towards the end. We got shuffled back in those last two restarts but it’s just luck of the draw and everything is so close in Sprint Cup racing that a few tenths of a second and one tenth goes a long ways.”

The 0.526-mile Martinsville short track is something of a crapshoot, so Menard will be concentrating on keeping his drive smooth and clean on Sunday.

“In Martinsville you are going to see the whole field covered by three or four tenths and it doesn’t take much to shuffle back and it seems like it takes a lot to go forward,” he said. “I think we finished 13th here last year and we will try to improve on that for sure.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.
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