As his NASCAR Cup career began to wind down in 2018 and his final season in 2019, Paul Menard looked forward to spending more time with his young and growing family.

He also looked forward to new challenges, including taking on a more involved role with his father John’s company, the massive Menards Home Improvement chain of nearly 350 stores across the U.S. The elder Menard has also been a sponsor in IndyCar for three decades.

The younger Menard had spent the better part of 30 years of his life in auto racing, starting with go-karts at the age of eight, and then working his way up the four-wheel ladder including ARCA (ironically called the ARCA Menards Series), and then through NASCAR Trucks, Xfinity and eventually spent 13 full-time seasons in NASCAR’s top-tier Cup Series with Dale Earnhardt Inc., Robert Yates Racing, Richard Petty Motorsports, Richard Childress Racing and Wood Brothers Racing.

He finished his NASCAR career with 699 combined starts (including 471 in Cup) and four wins (one in Cup – the 2011 Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis, plus three other wins in the Xfinity Series).

In his final Cup season in 2019, Menard said he might do a spot start here or there going forward, but for the most part, his racing days were all but over.

Couldn’t pass up a return to racing

That lasted four years before the racing bug bit him once again.

And boy, did that bug ever take a big bite out of Menard, as he enjoyed racing success like he never had before in his life.

Instead of going back to NASCAR, Menard joined the Trans-Am sports car series, racing on legendary road courses like Road Atlanta, Sebring International Raceway, Sonoma Raceway, Lime Rock Park, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Road America, Watkins Glen International, Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, Virginia International Raceway and Circuit of the Americas.

While he’s always enjoyed racing on twisting and turning road courses, when Menard joined the 3GT Racing team – owned by legendary racer and five-time TA champion Paul Gentilozzi – as a rookie for the 2024 season, hopes were high but expectations were uncertain as the season began.

Several months later, Menard ended the 2024 campaign as the TA Series champion. It was not beginner’s luck, as he’d come back in 2025 and win the championship again.

Including some one-off TA races he competed in much earlier in his NASCAR career, plus what he achieved in 2024 and 2025, Menard not only has the two TA titles, but also 12 wins in 36 career starts.

That’s an incredible career winning percentage of .333. And he’s just getting started.

The 45-year-old native of Eau Claire, Wisconsin recently spoke exclusively with EssentiallySports about the latest chapter of his racing career. Here are some highlights of that interview:

Q. After your NASCAR career concluded, what was it that drew you back to competitive racing in the Trans-Am Series?

A. It was kind of something that always, in the back of my mind, I wanted to pursue a little more, road course racing. I never retired from racing; I just was done with the NASCAR stuff. The commitment that it takes, 38 weekends a year and all that, with a young family, I didn’t think it was fair to my family or the team where I was at in life in order to give 100% to both of them, so I took a step back and chose family. I got out of NASCAR at the end of 2019, then all the COVID stuff started popping up in the spring of 2020, so I definitely got a lot of good family time in and did a lot of traveling and camping. I bought a little tag-along camper and we’d go up in the mountains about every weekend and do our thing.

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How Trans-Am attracted him

Q. So how did Trans-Am come about for you?

A. A buddy of mine who I worked with at DEI (Dale Earnhardt Inc.), Poncho Weber, was building a new Trans-Am car in the spring of 2020. Boris Said had been his driver for years and Boris is out in California, while Poncho’s shop is 10 minutes from where I live. Poncho wanted me to sit in the car, get the seat set, the pedals set, he needed a dummy basically to sit in the seat and the interior, so he called me and kind of got me back into the swing of things. I had previously ran five or six Trans-Am races back in 2002. The cars were amazing, hands down the most fun cars I’ve driven on asphalt.

The cars really haven’t changed that much. That’s what’s kind of cool about the series, is it’s still very pure, with two-prim chassis, carbon Kevlar fiberglass bodies, big engine, big brakes, no traction control, no ABS. They kind of remind me of Cup cars when I first got in back in like 2006, 2007. They were a handful to drive and that’s what these things are.

Q. Going from the NASCAR world for so many years, you get into Trans-Am, all of a sudden you just start kicking ass, winning numerous races and two championships back-to-back. It sounds like you’re having maybe the most fun you’ve ever had in racing, right?

A. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. We go to some really historic tracks in America and Canada, all world-class. Most of the tracks I had never been to and were kind of bucket list items, like Laguna Seca, Sebring, Mossport, COTA. The schedule’s great. It’s only 12 races. In 2026, there’ll still be 12 races, 10 weekends, including two double-headers. So you’re not traveling the 38 weeks a year.

And the atmosphere, it’s old school, kind of short-track racing atmosphere where everybody helps everybody out. After the race, everyone comes by the hauler and we’ll have some food and a cooler full of beer. So there’s a lot of camaraderie there. And it’s kind of old school, it’s kind of like short-track racing on road courses with these cool cars.

Q. When you left NASCAR, there were reports that you would be taking a more active leadership role in your father’s company. What are you doing there now?

A. There’s a lot of exciting stuff going on in Wisconsin (the company’s headquarters) with the company. We’re still growing and do some manufacturing and some really cool things. It’s always neat to keep up with that and the new products that come out and the vision for five years, 10 years, all that stuff. It’s neat to see what’s going on up there, but my part of that is it’s not real big. I don’t have a title; we’re not big on titles. Everybody just kind of does their job.

Does he miss NASCAR?

Q. What do you miss about NASCAR and what don’t you miss?

A. It’s the people, the teamwork, working with the crew chief and the engineers and the mechanics, the road crew. There’s so much work that goes on behind the scenes. When you get to the racetrack, most – and especially these days – it’s about practice. Everything’s done on a simulator now.

Back then, you did stuff at the shop to prepare for the week, what springs are going to happen, and then try this, the shocks, or we’re going to do a different package. That was always really interesting to me. And then you go to the track and then it’s like let’s make our goal happen, let’s try to make it work. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but yeah, the team aspect of it is what I miss most.

Q. You left NASCAR before the Generation 7 car came into play. What was its predecessor, the Gen 6, like driving-wise?

A. The cars were really fun to drive early on. The last few years, they started cutting the horsepower and became so aero-dependent that driving the cars was not that much fun. That’s kind of what got me out of it, honestly.

Q. You never really officially retired, you just left, so to speak. But you left at still a fairly early age (39). So you were in a good position to take on a second racing career in Trans-Am. What attracted you to Trans-Am? And then you go out and win back-to-back championships and 11 races in your first two seasons (2024 and 2025). Has this been kind of a revitalization for you as a race car driver?

A. I drive for Paul Gentilozzi and the 3GT team. They’re people, a great family. They’ve been doing this deal for a long time. Paul is the winningest Trans-Am driver with 33 and he’s been doing it since 1987. So as long as he’ll have a car and they’ll have me, I’d like to do that to some degree.

Q. Plus, the schedule is much more family friendly, right?

A. As long as the schedule doesn’t expand to more races, I’m good with 10 or 12 weekends a year. I’d also love to run the 24 Hours of Daytona again or do some IMSA stuff. But right now we’re just having fun in these badass cars.

Q. Earlier in your career, you even raced on ice. Then came NASCAR and now Trans-Am. Is there any other type of racing that you have never done or maybe just a few times that you’d like to do more of down the road?

A. I’ve always wanted to do rally racing. Rally is very similar to the ice racing stuff, with the same technique and driving style, except in Rally, you’re doing it through trees and kind of on a one-way plotted course. SCCA has a Rally series and I could see myself in a Rally car one of these days,  just go playing around with it. Nothing serious, just having some fun.

Q. When you were in NASCAR, did you get up a little bit more for the road courses like Watkins Glen and Sonoma, and did that lead you eventually to road racing in Trans-Am?

A. I was always excited to go to Watkins and Sonoma.  I started racing when I was eight years old on road courses and go-karts and I didn’t run my first oval until I was 16. So road racing was always kind of my background. I had to learn ovals pretty quickly where I felt pretty confident on road courses. So when you go to the road courses, you’d have a more peppier step, just from the pure enjoyment factor of banging gears and trying to maintain brakes and threshold and do all that stuff.

Q. Do your kids have any interest in following you into racing?

A. My daughter’s a little older. She doesn’t care about it at all. She’ll come to the track and hang out and stuff, but it’s not her deal. My son’s a little younger. He just turned eight years old, so he’s still pretty young, but he’s getting a little more interested. He’s been riding dirt bikes since he was three years old. So dirt bikes has kind of always been our thing that we do together, and he loves hunting too. We go hunting a lot. He’s starting to get a little interested in go-carts. I’ll probably get him a test in that one of these days and just see if he likes it. I’m certainly not pushing it, but if they want to test the waters,  I’m all for it.

Does he still attend NASCAR races?

Q. Do you still attend NASCAR races these days as a fan, catching up with your old racing buddies?

A. I’ve only been to one NASCAR race as a fan since I left, and that was the 2021 race at the Charlotte Roval. The only other race I went to as a fan was the 1994 Brickyard 400. But I’ve gone to a few other races the last couple years, just kind of hanging out. I helped Brandon Jones last year and Matt Crafton this year. If I go to the track, I don’t wanna be in the way, but I’d like to be helpful or useful. Somebody invites me to come hang out and bounce some ideas off, I’m all for it.

Q. The Trans-Am Series is both fun and continues to grow in popularity for both drivers and fans. Can you talk about that a bit more?

A. The biggest thing we’re trying to do with the Trans-Am Series is get more people talking about it. It’s a really cool format. We have the TA1 cars, which is what I drive, and then it’s a multi-class race, so the TA1 cars, and there’s some really cool sports cars. We have like a Mercedes AMG, which is an XGT class, all sorts of Porsches, GT3 Porsches, GT4 Porsches, and an SGT class, and then they have a GT class with a couple Maseratis running around.

If you’re into cars, it’s a cool series to come check out because you don’t know what’s gonna show up every week. There’s some exotics, and then the TA2 class, which runs separately from the TA and the other multi-class. TA2 is a great future series for young kids coming up. All these kids are very talented and they’re getting their start in these TA2 cars.

A lot of people don’t know that the Trans-Am series is the oldest road racing series in America; we’re gonna have our 60th year this year coming up, so that’s a big deal for Trans-Am. I just invite people to come on out and check it out, it’s real low-key, you can get right up to the cars, there’s no security, or a yellow shirt’s trying to kick you out. It’s a cool series, family friendly.

Trans-Am did an all-star race in 2024 at Lime Rock Park. It was a really cool format, they paired up a (T-A) pro and an all-star, guys like Ron Hornaday, Mike Skinner, Danny Sullivan, Geoff Brabham, some real heavy hitters. I never thought I’d race against Geoff Brabham or Danny Sullivan, but I did then and it was amazing. Hornaday and Skinner had a good time in those cars.