Scott Speed failed to win the Raybestos Rookie of the Year in his first full NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Speed was also optimistic after qualifying second and finishing 16th in the 2008 season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, where he was making one of five scheduled Cup starts for Red Bull in preparation for 2009.

His rookie season was a bumpy ride, however.

“Like most things, it was harder than I thought it would be, but a lot of things were easier than I thought it would be as well,” he says. “What certainly [was] a lot harder than I anticipated was the actual sort of racing of the deal. I got into these cars and went fast in them really quickly, and that’s sort of why we ended up going into the Cup program a year sooner that we originally planned, because in testing we were really quick, and I didn’t have much to compare with because at that time I was only racing ARCA and Trucks and doing well in both those, but when you moved up to the next level, the racing got a lot, lot tougher.

“When you’re going on the Cup side and you only have an hour-and-a-half of practice before you have to qualify for that weekend and then you only get two more hour practices, it doesn’t really leave a lot of time to learn, and that’s why experience is so valuable in the sport the way it’s set up at the moment, especially with the lack of testing. So it has made it harder on us for sure, but I think that overall we performed better this year and certainly better than we ended up showing, and we’ve been progressing the whole time, which obviously is the most important thing.”

Remaining authentic in a sport where corporate sponsors and image-conscious drivers maintain a large presence was also important to Speed.

“You can go up there and give a fake image to the public and to your peers in the sport and whatnot, and a lot of people do it,” he says. “Everyone does it, honestly, for the most part, and I try to be as honest as possible. It’s probably not the best thing for my racing career, but luckily I’ve got a sponsor with Red Bull that encourages that.

“That has honestly been probably the only reason I’ve been successful in motorsports [is] because I have a sponsor that just happens to look and love me being myself and not putting on a fake persona and giving the standard fake, ‘I-want-to-thank-five-different-sponsors-and-oh-yeah-the-car’s-running-good’ sort of speech every time the TV camera’s in my face.”

While Speed might not be a fan of the prototypical driver lingo, he has gained an appreciation for the sense of the camaraderie in the Cup garage – one that he deems unlike Formula One, where he competed in 2006 and 2007.

“The whole thing is such a different culture, it’s hard to describe,” he says of NASCAR. “It’s really 180 degrees different, and [there are] a lot of things I love about it. Everyone in the garage really rallies around certain people when they’re down, and in general it’s much more like a family, and everyone really takes care of each other, and that I really love.

“That’s sort of the American mentality, and it’s a really, I think, admirable trait of the sport that I don’t think many people even realize exists there because that’s all they’ve ever known. Coming from another sport like Formula One or just [the] racing in general in Europe that I’ve done, it’s a lot different over there, and not all of it’s for the better.”

Even though Speed endured a rough rookie campaign by most measures, he has no regrets about making the move to NASCAR and quickly jumping to Cup.

“It’s honestly been so much better than I could have imagined just for me as a person because I’ve had the opportunity to experience so much in my life,” he says. “This whole NASCAR lifestyle – not only [as] a racing athlete, not only learning a new total different form of racing but just to live the culture and to meet as many people as I have, that has been such a huge plus for me personally.

“There’s a lot of value in that that people, I guess, who have only done this their whole life don’t understand, but for me personally in my life, to have the opportunity to do it, that’s worth a ton to me.”

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