Jeff Gluck

USA TODAY Sports

Our series of NASCAR driver interviews continues this week with Paul Menard, who is currently 12th in the Sprint Cup Series point standings for Richard Childress Racing. Menard has already tied a career-high with nine top-10 finishes this season.

Q: When you're on a long green-flag run and not racing around anyone, what do you think about?

A: I guess you're always thinking about the next corner and what you want to do. By the time you enter the corner, you have to make up your mind where you want to go and where you want to be. The whole time down the straightaway, you're kind of thinking about what you did the last time through and if it was better or worse.

Sometimes your mind does wander if you're in a groove or a one-lane racetrack and it gets really spread out. But you're always thinking ahead one corner, basically.

Q: Fans often come up to you and want to discuss a moment or race from your career. Which one comes up the most?

A: The 2011 Brickyard 400. That one is easy. We go to different Menards stores throughout the Midwest and do some signings, and that's the No. 1 topic of conversation. So it's a cool one to rehash, for sure.

Q: If someone paid you $5 million to design a new racetrack and gave you an unlimited budget, what kind of track would you build?

A: I've always really liked Rockford Speedway (in Illinois). It's a quarter-mile, high-banked track and you run it a lot like Bristol where you run up the hill, get the car pointed the right direction and run back down the hill. I don't know if we could have 43 race cars with 900 horsepower on a quarter-mile track, but it'd be fun to try.

The other thing that would be pretty cool is the old high-banked board tracks (cars raced on tracks made of wooden planks in the 1920s). Again, I don't know how feasible it would be to have 43 race cars weighing 3,400 pounds — but we could probably get some lumber somewhere. (Smiles)

That sounds like a race most people would want to see.

It would pack the place. You could probably build a 200,000-seat grandstand for one race. It'd be pretty crazy.

Q: If you had a day off to do anything in the world you wanted — but you were not allowed to race — what would you do?

A: I love skiing, so if it's the wintertime, I'd probably do that. My goal is to try to ski on every continent. I don't know how feasible that will be.

How many continents have you skied on so far?

I've got one continent down, so I guess I need six more. I'd really like to go to the Alps sometime and tour around there. But yeah, apparently you can ski on every continent. I just haven't gotten that far yet.

Q: You get to have a lot of cool experiences away from racing through your job as a NASCAR driver. What's one that sticks out?

A: One that really stands out is a few years ago, we toured Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. That's where they keep the B-2 bombers, and we got to actually tour one. They've been around for 20 or 30 years, but they're still very secretive about how they manage the bombers. They don't let them out in daylight for very long. They keep them in the hangars at all times and they only stay overnight at the air base in Missouri — if they go over to Europe or the Middle East, they never land. So there was a lot of interesting stuff about that tour.

Q: When you go home after a bad day at the track, do you vent to someone about it or just keep it to yourself?

A: I kind of deal with it myself, and if I need to talk to (crew chief) Slugger (Labbe) or (owner) Richard (Childress) or (RCR director of competition) Eric Warren, I'll do that. But I try to keep business away from home and vice versa. My wife (Jennifer) is a trooper and she understands it. She's very supportive, but she knows when not to ask those questions, too.

Q: If you could point to another driver as a good example for your children in the garage, who would it be?

A: I guess they're all pretty good in their own way, but I got to spend a lot of time with Jeff Burton in the last couple years, and he really stands out. He's a heck of a race car driver, but he also balances his family life really well. He's a guy I felt like I could always go to and talk to.

Q: When you stand around with other drivers and tell old racing stories, what's one of your favorites to tell either about something that happened to yourself or someone else?

A: My very first ice race I ever did was pretty memorable. It had to be 1995 or 1996, and I was 15 years old. We were in La Crosse, Wis.

I was coming around to take the checkered flag in my first-ever ice race, and finished third. My brother, cousin, uncle and dad and a couple guys who helped us out had packed snowballs. So as I came to get the checkered flag, they threw snowballs at the car — but it cracked the windshield.

Well, we were going to race again the next day — it was a two-day event — so we wound up having to go to the junkyard. The car was a 1988 Toyota Corolla FX16, so it was a late night trying to find a windshield for that.

I'm not very familiar with ice racing. What's that all about?

The sanctioning body is the International Ice Racing Association, and they run throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin, up into Michigan and Canada a little bit. It's full-sized cars on plowed race courses, and they're all on frozen lakes. It's anywhere from a one-mile track to four- and-five mile tracks up on Lake Superior. You have fully studded tires. It depends how many cars show up, but it gets pretty interesting.

Q: What's a TV show you're really into right now?

A: On the way out to Sonoma, I finished Season 3 of Game of Thrones. I've got the fourth season all recorded right now on the DVR, so that's my next one.

Q: What's the last movie you saw — either at home or in the theater — and was it any good?

A: It was horrible, actually. The movie was Zombie Hunter. I watched it on Netflix. I'm a big Danny Trejo fan, and he had a short role in it. Basically, it was about a group of guys who survived a zombie apocalypse and are going around trying to kill zombies on their way out of town.

Q: If you could give a piece of advice to your younger self — something you know now that you didn't know then — what would it be?

A: A lot of times, we get so worked up in what we're doing right now — you have a bad day and you get bummed about it — but our jobs are pretty cool. What we do for a living is pretty awesome. I think it doesn't really matter what you do, but just enjoy it and try to find the best in it.

I've had a lot of jobs throughout the years, and some jobs I've liked and some I didn't like. Outside of racing, probably my favorite job was building store fixtures for Menards stores when I was in middle school and high school. It was a lot of carpentry work, and that was fun. So you try to find the good points in every job you have.

Did it take you a long time to learn how to build that stuff?

There were some old-timers who would take you under your arm and show you the ropes. And I always liked working with my hands, so it was fun.

Q: I've been asking each person to give me a question for the next interview. Last week was Josh Wise, and he wanted to know: "What gets you up in the morning? What drives you every day?"

A: Coffee. (Smiles) Coffee and my daughter. Outside of that, you're always trying to push yourself to get better at everything you do. That lasts throughout the day.

Q: And do you have a question for the next person?

A: Out of every place you go to on the tour, what's your favorite restaurant?

Follow Gluck on Twitter @jeff_gluck