All but lost amid the hoopla surrounding Juan Montoya's rookie season in Nextel Cup racing was a solid performance by David Ragan.

Ragan finished second to Montoya in the Raybestos Rookie of the Year standings, 24 points behind the Colombian superstar. In the final points standings, Ragan was a creditable 23rd, compared with Montoya's 20th.

Ragan also did full-time double duty in the Busch Series, where he won the rookie title in the final season of Anheuser-Busch sponsorship.

Having finished fifth in the final Busch standings, Ragan plans to compete for the series title next season when sponsorship transitions to Nationwide Insurance.

"Oh, yeah, we want to win the championship," said Ragan, who turns 22 on Christmas Eve. "For me, I can see where a guy like Kevin Harvick -- he's been there, done that and it probably doesn't mean anything to him right now. But it means something to me. Yeah, I want to win races, but it's cool to be battling for that points championship, and it's good experience for the Cup deal."

After Ragan's inauspicious debut at Martinsville in 2006, some of the sport's top stars expressed their doubts about Ragan's future as a Cup driver. But noticeable progress in 2007 began to quiet the naysayers.

It started with the season-opening Daytona 500, where Ragan started 35th, stayed out of trouble and surged to a fifth-place finish. That performance provided a large injection of confidence, but it also gave Ragan a false sense of security as he approached the rest of the season.

"I left Daytona, and I said, 'Man, this deal's kind of easy,' " said the driver of the No. 6 Roush Fenway Ford. "We had a good car when we went to California, and we finished 16th. Then we're still sitting fifth in points going to Vegas, and I said, 'Man, I think this is going to be all right.'

"Then we went to Vegas and struggled and went to Atlanta, and by the time we left Martinsville, we were [20th] in points. It's tough. Those guys are good. The guys like Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Matt Kenseth, they can stay in the top five, and they just don't make any mistakes. I feel like that's something I've really tried to work on, not making those mistakes -- looking back at races like Daytona, where you played it cool the first half, the first three-quarters of the race, and you wound up at the end with a top-10, top-15 finish."

Top 10s and top 15s, however, weren't exactly commonplace for Ragan during the rest of the season. He posted only one other top five (third at Richmond in September) and beyond that, only one other top 10 (10th in the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway). Nevertheless, he and Montoya were close together in the rookie standings until the final two months of the season, when a rough stretch of six straight finishes outside the top 25, starting with the October race at Talladega derailed his hopes of winning the rookie title.

"We had it there in our reach in the middle part of the year," Ragan said. "I think we were eight or 10 points behind, and then we just didn't perform like we needed to the last month of the season."

Nevertheless, Ragan's perspective on his first full season should stand him in good stead from a learning perspective.

"If you learn from your mistakes, that's some of the best ways that you can learn as a rookie," he said. "Sometimes you need to watch other people and learn from their mistakes, and that really makes your life a lot easier.

"You have to race a little different running for points than you do just going out on a weekend show and racing. That's something I've had to get experience on, getting points and making the right moves."