LOUDON, N.H. -- Roush Fenway Racing crew chief Jimmy Fennig won the inaugural Nextel Cup Series championship in 2004 with driver Kurt Busch, who was then in his fourth season in NASCAR's premier division.

After spending the better part of 2006 working in the organization's Busch Series operation, Fennig returned to the Cup Series this season to work with rookie of the year candidate David Ragan -- who made his series debut a year ago this weekend at Dover.

The pair had an auspicious 2007 beginning, as Ragan crashed out of his Gatorade Duel qualifying race for the Daytona 500, and then rebounded to finish fifth in the season opener.

Since then, Ragan has engaged in a fierce battle for the rookie of the year award with Juan Montoya. Fennig has guided Ragan, 21, to 21st in the point standings, one position behind Montoya.

At New Hampshire, Fennig took a break to discuss his driver's development, his future and the best way to deal with Dover's concrete high banks in the Car of Tomorrow.

Q: Jimmy, in addition to everything else you're responsible for, last weekend at New Hampshire, you had to be a weatherman and predict you were going to lose all your Saturday practice -- so how do you plan and prepare for that?

We came up to New Hampshire and knew there was a possible chance of rain for Saturday's practices, so we focused pretty hard on the first day on our race practice, before we did our qualifying runs.

We could do that because, with the way the top 35 is locked into the field, we didn't have to worry about preparing for qualifying. That's part of the deal and the other guys, that have to worry about qualifying because they're not in the top 35, they should have enough knowledge to get it close [for the race].

Q: In 2004 you were working the Chase with a champion to be, Kurt Busch; so how do you approach it this season, in general and specifically race to race, working with a rookie in David Ragan?

Well, this is my first year with David and it's David rookie year, and our goals were set for David to get a top 20 in points. David hasn't been to some of these racetracks at all, so this year we basically set our goals in the first half of the schedule to just run the racetracks, learn from them and go on.

In the second half, the goal was to go ahead and hopefully run top 10s. Next year, I feel David's come a long ways and that we'll have a shot at making the Chase and that'll be my goal for next year.

Q: You're in the middle of a pretty good rookie of the year battle, so do you look at that as your own mini Chase, if you will, where you're racing Juan and the others for that rookie title?

I don't know -- I mean, the rookie title's good for David and I'd like to see David get that rookie title -- and I know Jack [Roush] wants to get it, too. I just look at progress with the race team and look at the long-term.

There might be a few instances where we didn't develop as fast as we needed to or we didn't have cars that were good enough this year to get the rookie deal. But in the end run, I feel that David learned a lot this year and we've got the team up and running, and next year we'll have a shot to contend for the Chase.