Rookie Ragan winds up tops among Roush five (cont'd)

The rest of the Roush brigade was in trouble on this day, however.

"You wait until there's 10 to go, and you go [and] that's what I did," Biffle said. "I just took care of my car all day and when it came time I put the pressure on it. It was a good racecar. I don't know if I could've won, but I wish I wouldn't have got wrecked."

"It gets crazy at the end," Kenseth said in the understatement of the week. "I mean, you try to do everything you can, but nobody's perfect. I wrecked Jamie and caused that big wreck."

That backstretch tangle actually involved either four or five cars, depending on who you asked, including second-place starter Ricky Rudd and former Daytona 500 winner Dale Earnhardt Jr. It punctuated a classic case of what could have been versus what was, as four of the five Roush drivers were in the top 12 with 20 laps to go. Ragan was the only one who finished in the top 20.

And while his teammates' points standing took a blow, if Speedweeks 2007 could be considered an invaluable lesson learned, Ragan, 21, definitely injected himself into the middle of the 2007 rookie-of-the-year race, which he obviously leads at the moment, despite a real rookie mistake three days earlier.

Holding a guaranteed starting spot in the Daytona 500, Ragan wrecked his primary car in his Gatorade Duel qualifying race after leading early, not wrecking when a tire deflated but then trashing the car after the team changed it. Ragan said he was trying too hard.

"Certainly that was a big disappointment to us and something that could have been prevented by myself," Ragan said. "We had the bad luck of getting a flat right-rear tire, which that happens a lot of times, and it's up to myself as a racecar driver to be smart and get slowed down quick enough.

"Well, I honestly thought I could slow down 30 miles an hour and still hang on to it and I needed to slow down 70 miles an hour and I didn't get it slowed down quick enough and eventually couldn't hang on anymore."

After tuning his car through two days of practice, Ragan had a piece that was good enough to raise his best career finish from 25th on the Martinsville short track to fifth, making him only the third rookie to finish in the top five in the Daytona 500, joining Scott Wimmer (third, 2004) and Jeff Gordon (fifth, 1993).

"I think a top-five finish is great," Ragan said. "We want to be the top rookie, we want to be one of the top-contending Roush cars week-in and week-out [so] it's a pretty special day down here.

"It's been an up-and-down week. All in all, it ended up a good day. We've still got a lot of hard work ahead. We've got to go to California."

In the end, since he didn't make a trip to Victory Lane with his newly announced co-owner, John Henry, Jack Roush said he had little emotion left to sympathize with the runner-up to winner Kevin Harvick -- Martin, who drove for Roush the past 19 years before moving to Ginn Racing for this season.

"I'll congratulate [Martin] and commiserate with him for the fact that he didn't have the result that he wanted," Roush said. "But I didn't have a great evening, either."

But Ragan said that, at least for a night, he'd be on the proverbial Cloud Nine.

"I probably won't sleep a wink [Sunday night]," Ragan said. "We've got to get back and I think we're going to VIR (Virginia International Raceway) [on Monday] in the Busch car [so I've] still got a lot of hard work.

"We'll celebrate a little bit, and I'm sure we'll smile, but there's 35 more races and Martinsville pays the same amount of points that Daytona does, so we've got to keep digging."