Rookie Ragan winds up tops among Roush five

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Roush Fenway Racing almost had a stunning team debut Sunday in the 49th Daytona 500 -- but when what many will consider the wildest finish in the history of the "Great American Race" occurred, all they had was a shocked rookie, David Ragan, in fifth.

"To get down to the truth, I probably don't deserve it [because] certainly Greg Biffle and Matt Kenseth -- they're the smart racecar drivers on our team and they were running up front the whole day," Ragan said. "It was a long day for us and we came out on the top side of things, but certainly, week-in and week-out, Greg Biffle and Matt Kenseth are gonna show you why they're the champions."

The stats backed Ragan's contention. He started 35th and never hit the top 20 until 10 laps remained, when he was 16th. But the final results proved that, when all heck broke loose -- as it did twice in the last 16 laps -- the kid with the least experience among the five Roush Fenway drivers held the steadiest wheel.

"I was just trying to stay in line and stay out of the way and try to finish this thing, but certainly it was wild," Ragan said of the finish. "The first part was pretty easy and a little too calm, I guess. We had a chance to work on our cars and everybody had good-handling cars there at the end and was giving it all they had."

It certainly didn't look like Ragan would be the team leader with less than 10 of the original 200 laps remaining, when Biffle and Kenseth were stacked up behind leader Mark Martin, who last season was a teammate to all five drivers and whom Ragan replaced in Roush's famous No. 6 Ford.

When the race's final caution at Lap 197 rearranged the order and set up a green-white-checkered finish, Kenseth still had a chance for a top-three going into Turn 3 on the last lap, and Biffle was potentially looking at a top-five.

But when the checkers, dust, sparks and smoke had fallen Ragan's was the only RFR car unscathed. Carl Edwards, who precipitated the race's penultimate caution when he slapped the wall coming off Turn 4 on Lap 186, was 23rd; Biffle 25th; Kenseth 27th; and Jamie McMurray, who was eighth in the same line as his teammates at Lap 190 but was wrecked by Kenseth in the penultimate caution and finished 31st.

"On the last lap, I saw Kyle Busch run off the apron coming off of [Turn] 4," Ragan said. "I just kind of stood my ground and stayed straight and kept my eye on the start/finish line and that's where I was trying to get to."

His crew chief, Jimmy Fennig, who won the 1988 Daytona 500 with the veteran Bobby Allison, said he was impressed with his young driver, too.

"David has got a lot of talent -- a lot of talent," Fennig said. "We've just got to keep working him into all these places and he'll be fine."

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."