iNSIDE SCOOP: Silly Season in April

By Ron Lemasters Jr.

I've been waiting for this.

The first speculative story predicting that a major team owner would be selling his team and getting out of the sport has John Menard buying out Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates.

Mike Mulhern, perhaps the hardest digger in the NASCAR media for the past 20 years, broke that story yesterday, citing "intense speculation in the garage area." Of course, that could mean that one guy told another guy he'd heard that, not that a major scoop had been unveiled.

Let's assume for a moment that the rumor/speculation is true. I don't know that it is, or that it isn't, so let's be clear on that. What does it mean?

Well, Menard has owned teams before in Indy Car racing, and it's not like he doesn't have the money. His son, Paul, races for Richard Childress, and Menard's business is his son's sponsor.

If you've never been to a Menard's, you need to go. It's like Lowe's and Home Depot, crossed with a Super Walmart or Target. You can buy a bag of ten-penny nails, crates of motor oil and enough root beer and chips to fuel a birthday party for 40 10-year-olds and a gigaton of trash bags to clean up the mess afterward.

I digress.

Menard is a savvy guy, an entrepreneur without peer and a guy who just loves racing. He started out as an ice racer in his native Wisconsin. Have you seen ice racing? It is what I imagine the races that took place in a farmer's field among NASCAR's pioneers would have looked like. A bunch of guys soup up their cars, clear a track of sorts on a frozen lake and race their backsides off.

Once bitten, Menard got into Indy Cars, then the premier motor sport in the country, as a sponsor for Wisconsin driver Herm Johnson. His main goal was to win the Indianapolis 500, and Lord, did he try. He came to the Speedway with the best chassis he could buy, bolted in one of the brute-force Buick V-6 engines and started setting track records.

Of course, the engines had massive power and went really fast, but had to be de-tuned to last for 500 miles. They never won, though he racked up a bunch of top-five and top-10 finishes at the Brickyard.

One of the guys Menard gave an opportunity to at Indy was a young USAC driver named Tony Stewart.

Ganassi, whose open-wheel teams have won title after title and Indy 500 after Indy 500, has not had the same measure of success in stock cars, and has had a couple of seasons of less than stellar results.

According to Mulhern, Ganassi ranks seventh out of eight top team owners in finishes. "Of particular disappointment is Montoya, who is averaging a 27th place finish; Montoya's last top-10 was at Michigan last June, and his last tour win was at Watkins Glen in the summer of 2010. McMurray's seventh at Martinsville last weekend was his best finish in over a year," Mulhern wrote.

Can I see it happening? Yes. Will it happen? Don't know. But it's fun to speculate on something like this.