Strong effort doesn't cost Nadeau perspective

If you do business in a public arena, you'd better wear nonstick skin.

There's no shelter from observation, and when that business includes a particularly visible partner, the observation can burn like a heat lamp.

That's one of several reasons Jerry Nadeau and his No. 01 team basked in the glow of Sunday's fourth-place finish at Texas Motor Speedway. It was territory they thought they should have visited already, and as many high-fives were exchanged beside Nadeau's Pontiac afterward as there probably were beside Ryan Newman's Dodge in victory lane.

BEST EFFORT Jerry Nadeau scores a fourth-place finish at Texas, his best finish since 2001 Play video  •  Nadeau's Driver Page

"It's an exciting weekend to have a shot at the pole and an outside shot at winning the race right there," Nadeau's crew chief Ryan Pemberton said. "We feel real good about it."

For once, Nadeau finished where he started. He'd begun in fifth place and suffered no misfortune or crazy incidents. It was a solid performance by a team plagued with newness -- a new driver, a new crew chief, a new number and paint scheme, a new sponsor.

Shop location and ownership (MB2 Motorsports) are about the only entities that haven't changed, and there likely have been times when driver and crew chief wondered if someone taped a "hit me" sign to their bumper.

"It's great for the team," Pemberton said of the Texas finish. "It's our first in-house chassis, and we built it from the ground up. We started about a month and a half ago with our own program and it does a lot for everybody, because everybody in the shop has a hand in building this car."

In the four races before Texas, Nadeau had started 11th at Las Vegas, 14th at Atlanta, third at Darlington and 13th at Bristol. He finished 22nd at Las Vegas, 31st at Atlanta, 35th at Darlington and 28th at Bristol.

At Atlanta, a wreck knocked him out. At Darlington, Nadeau spun on lap six, inciting the first caution. He returned to the lead lap, but couldn't stay there. At Bristol, day-ending contact with Newman prompted him to storm into Newman's pit, providing the season's first confrontational highlight.

Both Nadeau and Pemberton think they would have had a top-five at Daytona without the rain. Nadeau says that in early races, the team lost laps, but always improved toward the end.

"Darlington, we had a top-five car," Pemberton said. "Bristol, we had a top-five car. So we felt like we were 50-50 for the year as far as having a top-five car, but we haven't had a finish."

Then there's the sponsor spotlight. Because of Middle East hostilities, the No. 01's growing pains have been more visible that usual. Everywhere they've been this season, Nadeau, Pemberton, general manager Jay Frye, et al, have been asked to address the significance of military backing and the ominous-ness of war.

It's unlikely the U.S. Army timed its primary sponsorship to coincide with Operation Iraqi Freedom, but Nadeau's team has embraced all the inevitable attention: the four-star general who visited them in Atlanta, the significance of that big gold star and "Army of One" logo emblazoned on fire suits and sheet metal. The team even changed the No. 36 that Nadeau's predecessor, Ken Schrader, ran last year to No. 01.

"We go home at night, Jerry and I," Pemberton said. "We talk about what we're going to do with the car, [what] we're not real happy with the car and really agonize over a pound of air or a spring rubber or a 50-pound spring. And that's really nothing compared to what's going on in the world today."

Officials from the National Guard, the Army and the Air Force -- the service branches currently involved in Winston Cup racing -- say sponsorship is a recruiting and publicity tool, but right now it's more than a symbol. Nadeau visited U.S. troops in Afghanistan during the offseason. He and the other military-sponsored drivers, Ricky Rudd (Air Force) and Todd Bodine (National Guard), are usually prominent in pre-race ceremony television shots. And greeting garage visitors in fatigues means more than it used to.

So does the possibility that some NASCAR fans in uniform, half a globe away, might have relished Nadeau's finish.

"Our problems that we have here at the race track are nothing compared to what those guys are doing for us around the world there," Pemberton said of U.S. troops. "That's what we're really thinking about."

Denise N. Maloof covers NASCAR for SI.com.