Speed to make Cup debut at Martinsville

Debut #2 for Scott Speed comes this weekend at Martinsville Speedway, where he'll drive the #84 Red Bull Toyota in the first of five races to close the Sprint Cup season. The 25-year-old Speed missed out on his first attempt at a Cup race when rain cancelled qualifying last Thursday at Charlotte. "Martinsville isn't the nicest track to make my introduction to Cup, but it's got to happen sometime," Speed said. "It's going to be a tough race, and I expect to get beaten up quite badly, like everyone else. The drivers are going to be really rough, and I'm not going to make a lot of friends out there being a rookie." Speed has experienced Martinsville's long straightaways and tight corners once before. In his second start in the Craftsman Truck Series, he finished 10th there last March. He'll also drive Bill Davis Racing's #22 Toyota truck in Saturday's truck race. In the span of a short Sunday afternoon, Scott Speed went from points leader to finishing fifth in the ARCA RE/MAX Series championship. He got wrecked by his closest pursuer on lap 27 and returned the favor seven laps later – an incident that classified his car's damage as "terminal" after it hit the inside and outside walls. Still, Speed said he earned valuable "street cred." "Straight out of 'Days of Thunder,' I just said, "Change my tires. Just put the tires on it and let me go out and try it," said Speed (a.k.a. Cole Trickle). "I went out for a lap and a half until the 99 (Ricky Stenhouse Jr., a.k.a. Russ Wheeler) was in our presence. And I did to him what he did to me. From my perspective, I was the championship leader and he disrespected me on the track so there was no way I was going to let him win a championship like that." Speed finished 34th in ARCA's season finale. His 2008 stat line reads like this: four wins, three poles, 10 top fives and 17 top 10s in 21 races. Red Bull Racing PR