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But it was still good enough to earn him the Raybestos Rookie of the Year award and put him alongside those four and other former top rookies in Winston Cup like Jeff Gordon, Davey Allison, Rusty Wallace, Dale Earnhardt and Richard Petty.
McMurray's numbers were solid, if not spectacular: one pole, five top-fives, 13 top-10s and a 13th-place finish in the points.
 | JAMIE MCMURRAY | | | | |  | |
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"I think our season has been OK," McMurray said. "We definitely wanted to win a race before the season was over. We came close at the Brickyard and Southern 500, two of the biggest races of the year, but it just didn't work out with the caution flags.
"That's just part of it. We put ourselves in position to win, and that's all you can do. When it's your day, it's your day. When it's not, there's not anything you can do about it. You've just got to take what you can get."
McMurray and his Donnie Wingo-led crew took a lot the second half of the season. After a 28th-place finish in the second Pocono race, McMurray found himself 25th in the Winston Cup standings.
He turned things around with a terrific run at Indianapolis that nearly ended in Victory Lane. McMurray led twice for 22 laps that day in August, and he was so closer to winning that he had a hard time concentrating on driving his No. 42 Dodge.
But on a late restart, McMurray was passed by Kevin Harvick and ended up third. Though disappointed, McMurray was able to smile afterward.
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| Under the direction of crew chief Donnie Wingo, McMurray's performance steadily improved over the course of the year. Credit: Autostock |
Maybe he knew something the rest of the NASCAR world didn't. Two races later, he was third at Bristol and backed that up with a fourth in the Southern 500. Down the stretch, McMurray posted five more top-10 finishes -- including three in a row at one point -- in the final nine races.
"Overall at the beginning of the year our goal was to get better at the end of the year," McMurray said. "Pretty much into the season it was to be better each time we went back to the track.
"The first time Donnie and I went to those tracks together it was with cars that I'd never driven and he'd never worked on with a group of people we'd never been around. Our second time around to the tracks we ran extremely well and a lot better than we did the first time. That was very important."
McMurray will credit Wingo and his crew, but the driver had a lot to do with it, too. A relative unknown a little more than a year ago, McMurray proved he belonged with the big boys. And he managed to stay his smiling self, too.
"The way he races and he adapts so well -- he can race well around other cars, and other drivers feel comfortable racing around him," Wingo said. "He's just a good racer.
"We need to work on our qualifying a little bit, but I thought that got better toward the end of the year. When I saw him run those few races he ran last year, he's just so comfortable in the car. He's a good communicator, too.
"I'd compare him to maybe Jimmie Johnson or a Ryan Newman. Those guys come in and they're good racers and qualifiers. I think Jamie is very comparable to them."
McMurray closed the season with a pole and a ninth-place finish at Homestead-Miami Speedway. That enabled him to wrap up the rookie award, beating Greg Biffle, Tony Raines, Casey Mears, Jack Sprague and Larry Foyt.
Now, McMurray gets to take the yellow stripe off his back bumper.
"I don't think the stripe on the bumper is as bad as all the rookie meetings you have to go to," McMurray said. "When I first started in the truck series, I wanted to go to those because they tell you things about racetracks that you don't know.
"When you get to the Busch Series, it's like you've got to do it all over again. When you get to Cup, you've already done those like 60 times and you've been to every one of those race tracks three or four times.
"You have to go. For the most part, it's the same meeting every week and it's just a routine, especially the second half of the season when you've already been to that race track with the same car with the same group of people. I'm most looking forward to not having to go to those meetings at 10:20 every Friday morning."
That's McMurray. He's managed to race hard, speak him mind and not ruffle too many feathers.
What else can a rookie hope for?
"I tried to do my best," McMurray said. "I'm sure I made some people mad, and that's all part of it, but I tried to do my best to respect all those guys and race them when I needed to and when I didn't have a car that was capable of racing them, not to do something stupid to cause a wreck or hold someone up.
"It's hard for fans to realize what all goes on in the car. You're driving your heart out every lap, but there's a lot to the mental side of racing, thinking about what's going to go on later in the race.
"Mark Martin came up to me two or three times and said, 'Man, you're doing the right thing. That's the way you're supposed to race.' I think that was one of the coolest things that happened to me this year as far as someone coming up and talking to me.
"I had two or three other drivers tell me the same thing. The champion said that. That meant a lot to me."
Almost as much as a victory. But there's always next year.
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