Busch, Truex Jr. break up the Chase party in Loudon (cont'd)

Burton and Earnhardt ended up finishing fourth and fifth; but the fact that he lost ground at the end hardly fazed Truex, who scored his first top-10 in five races.

"That was a great run for [our] guys," Truex said. "We had a great car and if the race would have stayed green, I feel like we would have easily been top five. It wasn't that great on restarts, but after 10 laps or so it started to come to me; but, we'll take seventh.

"The main thing for us is that it's great to be competitive again."

Busch hoped his two-race string carried over to the upcoming track, saying even though the majority of the Chase races are on high-speed intermediate racetracks, the philosophical direction they're exploring might pay dividends, and his crew chief Pat Tryson agreed.

"Overall, the concept that we put in the car for the last two weeks, we need to work on that for the other tracks in the next couple weeks to continue this baseline," Busch said. "So we'll see where that takes us."

"We've been working pretty hard and have come up with some things that I think have been helping us," Tryson said. "It looks like right now we've got our short track program going a little bit so now we've just got to go to work on our big track program -- keep working hard and keep digging and hopefully we can catch up with those other guys."

Busch started the season with a second place finish behind Penske teammate Newman, but he spiraled out of Chase contention with a rough seven-race run shortly after that and never recovered; so Tryson said the last two good finishes were positives.

"It's big," Tryson said of momentum building, "because if we can just come into next year with a positive attitude [because] most of this year, obviously, we haven't had happy times. So to go into next year with a positive attitude would be really good and hopefully we've got some new stuff coming along and some new generation cars and hopefully they're better yet and we can start beating some of these guys."

Manion agreed with Tryson when it came to the subject of momentum, after his team moved up two spots in the official standings, to 15th while Busch advanced one spot, to 18th.

If there were an unofficial "Chased-Out" standings for the teams that didn't qualify for the 12-man championship playoffs, Busch has a four-point lead over Truex. Manion said he liked the concept.

"We've just gotta make this our own Chase, and see where would we finish up," Manion said. "Not that it matters, but it's self-gratifying to the whole team [to run and finish strong]. This was a brand-new car and it ran good today and we're making improvements to the team and getting ready for '09."