Allmendinger's Super Bowl ruined, but not '08 season (cont'd)

Allmendinger failed to qualify for 19 of the 36 points races last year, but the team stuck with him.

"Honestly, a lot of credit goes to the guys standing behind me," Allmendinger said, motioning toward his crew. "I was ready to commit suicide multiple times last year. Probably the biggest thing that happened was at Indy, when we hit the wall [during qualifying for the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard].

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"We were probably going to make the race, but I hit the wall in Turn 4, didn't make the race. I was ready to go home. I was ready to retire, quit, jump off a bridge, whatever. I was going to leave the racetrack. They wanted me to stay for media stuff, but I didn't care. I was ready to leave.

"And right as I went to step outside my bus, I looked out my window, and the whole 84 team was standing outside my bus, and they said, 'You're not leaving. We're here to party tonight.'"

Allmendinger is realistic enough to know that the proof of his improvement, and that of his team, will have to wait until the green flag for the Daytona 500 on Feb. 17. That doesn't mean, however, that he can't be sanguine about his prospects for 2008.

"I'm very comfortable in what I feel in the racecar," he said. "At this point last year, I was just hanging on -- and wasn't hanging on very well, obviously. I'm very comfortable with what I feel, what I can feed back to the team. I'm comfortable with the changes that they're making.

"Through most of [last] year, up to the end of the year, I was just kind of telling them, 'All right, fix it; I don't know how. I don't know what I want to feel, but this doesn't feel good.' Now I know what I want to feel, and I can relay that back to Ricky [Viers], my crew chief, and all the engineers."

As far as his temperament goes, Allmendinger says he'll be a kinder, gentler driver this season. And he promises to stop breaking things. His computer bit the dust after he failed to qualify for the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

"At Homestead, I finished the laptop off last year, and my wife cussed me out because we had all of our files on there," Allmendinger said. "So, no more breaking anything.

"I'm calling myself 'Triple C' this year -- cool, calm and collected. So, hopefully, we can continue that throughout the year, even in tough times. Everybody's just calling me 'T.C.,' and if I start to get frustrated, they say, 'T.C., calm down.'"