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Like many a school kid returning to school after spring break, Paul Menard and the No. 21 Menards\/Maytag team will be hitting the books this week as the prepare for Saturday night\u2019s 400-lapper at Richmond Raceway.<\/p>\n
Menard and the team are coming off their season-best performance in which they finished sixth in last Sunday\u2019s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway.<\/p>\n
And while Richmond falls in the same short-track category as Bristol, the similarities pretty much end there.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a totally different track,\u201d Menard said.<\/p>\n
For whatever reason, both he and his Wood Brothers team tend to struggle at Richmond. Menard, who has seven career top-10 finishes at Bristol, has just one at Richmond. The Woods have 26 top-10s at Bristol and 19 at Richmond.<\/p>\n
Menard said he and the team plan to spend the week looking over notes from previous races and processing other data in hopes of reversing their Richmond fortunes.<\/p>\n
\u201cBristol is one of our better tracks and Richmond is one of our worse tracks, so we\u2019re going do a lot of studying this week,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Menard is hoping track officials don\u2019t complicate matters more by applying PJ1 traction compound to the racing surface as was done with success at Bristol this past week.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know if they\u2019re going to lay any PJ1 down for that track,\u201d he said. \u201cI hope they don\u2019t for that track. It widens out as it is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Qualifying at Richmond is set for 5:40 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, and the 400-lap race is scheduled to start just after 7:30 p.m. on Saturday with TV coverage on FOX.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Like many a school kid returning to school after spring break, Paul Menard and the No. 21 Menards\/Maytag team will be hitting the books this week as the prepare for Saturday night\u2019s 400-lapper at Richmond Raceway. Menard and the team are coming off their season-best performance in which they finished sixth in last Sunday\u2019s Food […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[788],"tags":[503,972],"coauthors":[675],"class_list":{"0":"post-20327","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-paul-menard","9":"tag-richmond-raceway"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20327"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=20327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}