Around Michael Waltrip Racing, don't even think of uttering the F-word. People hear it, and they bristle. They get angry. They threaten to wash out your mouth with the foulest-tasting industrial-strength soap they can find. There's no place for that kind of language at the 3-year-old NASCAR organization.

The word in question being "fluke," of course, the term some have applied to the success of the Waltrip team through the first three weeks of the Sprint Cup season. David Reutimann hasn't placed worse than 14th, and last weekend at Las Vegas recorded the first top-five finish of his career. The driver of the No. 00 car ranks fifth in points entering Sunday's race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, while teammate Waltrip stands on the Chase bubble in 12th position. Although the organization may not yet have turned the corner, it certainly seems to be peeking around it.

It's an early season surge no one outside the walls of Waltrip Raceworld would have expected, especially after seeing the two drivers finish 22nd and 29th, respectively, in final points last season. But a pole for Reutimann in the 2008 finale at Homestead, a flurry of personnel moves throughout the last year, and markedly faster cars on the race track have officials with the Waltrip organization thinking about race wins and playoff positions -- things that flukes just don't do.

"We have said as an organization that we think we will win three races this year," vice president and general manager Ty Norris stated flatly. "People look at us like, that's crazy with Kyle Busch winning all these races, you've got Jimmie Johnson, you've got Jeff Gordon back on his game. I said, look at the lap speeds. If you just watched the lap speeds at California, if you watched them at Las Vegas, even back to last year. We started gaining a tremendous amount of momentum last fall, and you started seeing David Reutimann in that mix all the time. We would make a mistake on pit road or make a mistake somewhere else, but the lap times were always there, very, very fast. So that's what tells us that we can win races, and what tells us that we're not a fluke. It shows us that David Reutimann and Michael Waltrip have a legitimate shot at the Chase this year."

The turnaround, Norris believes, has been a gradual process. While a stable rules package from NASCAR and a ban on sanctioned testing helped the organization catch up financially and technically, personnel hires have made the biggest difference. Last April brought the arrival of engineering director Nick Hughes, now the team's technical director, who Norris says has brought Waltrip's engineering department more in line with the likes of Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing. Mike Clark, who heads up manufacturing and fabrication, came on board and has delivered cars built on time that fit NASCAR templates. And this past September, Steve Hallam, the former head of race operations at the McLaren Formula One team, was hired as Waltrip's director of race engineering.

Hallam, a native of England, is a former F1 engineer and team manager who was part of five world championship teams in 27 years on the circuit. He now serves as the team's competition director.

"We bust on him a lot asking him what the proper F1 term would be," Reutimann joked. "We ask him if when he drinks his tea, if his pinky is out and stuff like that. He's a great guy, a phenomenal talent. He's definitely brought a certain amount of leadership to our organization. We've always had great people, but the way his structure is and the way he brings things together, and all the engineers work well together. I think that's a positive. He makes sure that all teams work as one cohesive unit. He makes sure that we are always sharing the information that we should be sharing."

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Year 3 we were going to be competing for wins ... and that's where we are. We are on our master plan.

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TY NORRIS

And he's instilled a degree of accountability that includes the team's drivers.

"He probably for the first time calls drivers out, as they did in Formula One, for mistakes," Norris said. "When there's an issue about getting on pit road, when there's an issue on the race track, he has the respect and says, 'Tell me what we did wrong there. Here's what we need to be thinking about.' He flat out told them, 'I can't fix emotion.' He told them, 'You give us fair feedback, and we'll give you all we've got on pit road to make proper adjustments, but if you let your emotions get the best of you, it's going to be difficult. We can't fix your emotions, we can only fix the race cars.' He set the tone early of accountability for everyone, whether it be a pit crew member, a mechanic, a crew chief's call, a driver's decision during the race. All those things, he has just given us a really solid overall perspective that holds people accountable. It's maybe something our organization has lacked over the last couple of years as we were starting to build up."

It all shows in the preparation. During the organization's tumultuous first season, Waltrip remembers thinking how nice it was to just have a copy machine. Employees in key positions came and left, often forcing the team to fill gaps on the fly. They struggled to get cars ready, struggled to make races, struggled from week to week. During a race weekend at Kansas, Waltrip spotted fellow team owner and former business partner Bill Davis, and gave him a hug. His admiration for Davis' long tenure in NASCAR had grown with every hardship Waltrip had faced.

"Bringing guys in and creating a foundation is harder than I would have ever imagined due to the fact that we picked all these folks to come in and be a part of our team. Next thing you know, that guy is gone," Waltrip said. "When you just started, then your foundation is broken. If you've been together for 20-some years and guys come or go, the process and the foundation is built and you can stomach that easier, it won't affect you nearly as much. We lost two or three people off of our original starting lineup, well then someone else comes in and says, 'No, that's not how we need to go about this.' Just getting a process and a direction and mainly your feet under you was the hardest part of this."

The solid runs of this early season were all part of the master plan. Norris said Toyota, which backed the Waltrip organization's entry into the Cup circuit, explained that growth would be a three-year process. Year 1 would be difficult -- although no one had any idea of just how difficult it would turn out to be. Year 2 would bring signs of progress, which Norris says were evident in Reutimann's string of top-20 finishes to finish last season. And Year 3 would bring the breakthrough.

"Year 3 we were going to be competing for wins as an organization, and that's where we are," Norris said. "We are on our master plan. There are probably a couple of other things that have helped us in that some teams have dropped off, and the no-testing policy helped us to catch those more mature organizations to where now I feel like every week where we go, we can be competitive."

That much is evident in the results thus far. Now it's just a matter of carrying that momentum forward, and banishing the dreaded F-word from everyone else's vocabulary as well.

"You're out there and things are going well and you get that confidence built up, but you also want to know in your own heart that it's not a fluke, that we're not just lucking into this deal," Reutimann said. "I think that's what some people think from time to time. If you look at how we finished last year, and how things started to go, then how we started out this year -- maybe we have a little more wiggle room to be confident, as opposed to be lucking into things."