Full Throttle

Scott Speed has admitted that he ‘doesn’t really care’ about results heading into his rookie season in the NASCAR Sprint Cup, with the former F1 racer stating that he simply wants to finish where his car is capable of finishing.

“As far as results are concerned, I don’t really care, honestly,” he said. “What I care most about is being able to finish where the car is set up to run.”

A reasonable mind set for a NASCAR rookie I’d suggest. At this point in his young Cup career he has it all to learn.

Speed added that he is well aware of the fact that he has a lot to learn about competing at the highest level in NASCAR, but said he wasn’t afraid to approach his rivals for advice.

“Everyone,” he said when asked who he will go to. “It’s difficult to get (helpful) advice. I’m an extremely talented racecar driver. There’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t know.

What’s impossible is the experience, doing it, getting the feeling for it. That’s priceless. The experience plays a lot into it. Not necessarily into going fast, but making good decisions on what you want to do to the racecar. If our racecar’s right, we’re going to be fast. Then there’s the racing itself. Just racing three-wide, racing on the topside, how that whole thing plays out as you go into a corner is completely different from road racing. I’m learning a lot as we go.

I’ll admit when first reading this I went, “Huh, he knows everything, as a Sprint Cup Rook?”

Upon the second reading I see his larger point. There’s nothing that teaches better than experience and if he means what he says and competes at whatever level his car and team is capable of he’ll do just fine. He might even make the Rookie of the Year race against a much stronger team in the form of Joey Logano and JGR interesting.

On the other hand, I had a flash back to last fall at Toledo Speedway.

The ARCA RE/MAX Series title was Speeds for the taking, all he had to do was keep a cool head, and finish in the top five, possibly the top ten.

Speed and Ricky Stenhouse went to the Toledo event battling for the title, but Stenhouse put Speed’s car in the wall. Speed’s team got the car back on the track although it was not in race condition to say the least, where he returned the favor on Stenhouse.

Justin Allgaier, who entered the race third in points, went on to win the championship.

“He was on my bumper and he pushed me flat out into the wall,” Speed told The Speed Channel. “The car was completely undriveable. I couldn’t do anything with it. He started it. He ain’t going to win the championship with that attitude. That’s ridiculous. That was the most blatant thing I have ever seen in my life.”

And neither did Speed, and dare I say there was something he didn’t know that day, how to win a championship.

Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, that remains to be seen as the Cup rookie battle heats up later in the year.

One thing is sure, we haven’t heard the last from Scott Speed.

Hell the rookie battle between Speed and Logano might not be the story this year.

It might be a battle of loose cannons, Scott Speed vs Kyle Busch, and scored based on the number of avoidable wrecks and on-mic episodes of loose lips going off like 4th of July star-bursts.

Not that that’s a bad thing, rivalries are a good thing whether they take to form of bashed finders or verbal sound bites. With luck these two will cause Blockbuster to rethink a marketing campaign and issue Voodoo Dolls of Speed and Busch.