Speed's development may be accelerated after test (cont'd)

Yet Speed says he does not particularly care for driving the ARCA cars. He much prefers driving in the Craftsman Truck Series, where he has made 10 starts this season -- winning once, at Dover, while registering three top-five and five top-10 finishes.

"Truck racing has been amazingly valuable to me," Speed said. "I learned way more in one Truck race than I did in a whole season of racing in ARCA."

The trucks drive much more like the current car being used in the Sprint Cup Series than anything else, including the ARCA and Nationwide Series cars.

Speed said he believes he is ready to drive in a Cup race, but then he never really ever thought he wasn't. He simply figures that if he waits a little longer, getting a little more test time under his belt, he'll be even more ready to handle whatever comes his way.

"It's clear how I feel," Speed said. "I'm very sure I could have come over here right from Formula One, gotten in a [new car], and not looked stupid. I would have gone out and raced and I would not have been as successful as I would be right now there, but I could have done it and I wouldn't have looked silly. The more experience I have outside of it -- before I go into the [new car] at the Cup level -- the better I'll be when I get there.

"So for me personally, as a racecar driver, I'm only 25; the longer I spend before I get there, the better it is for me. I'm in no rush. If I want to do this for 10 or 15 years, I can. For me, it's different than Juan [Montoya], for example. You look at us and you might say we've got very similar backgrounds in our experience and our ability level. But he, at his age [33], needs to come right in. He doesn't have time to spend years in ARCA and the Truck Series before getting to Cup. I have that luxury, if I want it. At the moment, everything has gone so well; I can tell you that the original plan, we are speeding that up for sure."

Asked if anything has caught him by surprise during his 10 starts in the Truck Series, Speed immediately broke into laughter.

"Yeah, I didn't expect to win," he said. "And honestly, I probably shouldn't have. It wasn't like I was the best guy in the Truck Series at that point in time. Far from it. It was just one of those things where we were in the right place at the right time. But I feel very good now. I think after Michigan and after Bristol, I really felt like I was running up front on my own merit."

As the two-day Cup test at LMS wound down, Speed said he was pleased with how he fared.

"I think it went very well," he said. "We worked through some problems in the beginning that we had with the new car. And by the end, we were really competitive. I think our pace, especially our race pace, was really good."

Asked if he felt he would be ready if he gets the call to get in the seat of a Red Bull Cup car down the stretch of this season, Speed smiled again and answered, "Absolutely."