FORT WORTH, Texas -- Two Earnhardt Ganassi Racing cars were in the top 10 after Saturday afternoon's Happy Hour practice for the Samsung 500 at Texas Motor Speedway; and that's a welcomed good sign for Sunday's seventh race of the Sprint Cup season.

What might be absolutely huge for a season slowly inching toward the edge of disaster is the highly anticipated appearance of a common chassis constructed using the best ideas from both elements of EGR. It might appear as early as in two weeks when the season resumes at Phoenix after next weekend's Easter break.

In Saturday's post-practice debrief, there were difficulties making valid points despite EGR's heralded communication continuing. It didn't render Juan Montoya's ninth place in his No. 42 Chevrolet and Martin Truex Jr.'s 10th in the No. 1 totally moot -- just a little less valuable.

The team's third driver, Aric Almirola, had his No. 8 back in 36th, seven-tenths of a second behind Truex.

To an indefinable degree, the divergent versions of NASCAR's new car each team is using may be at the root of a less-than-satisfying season-to-date for EGR, which is the result of an offseason partnership between the former Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Chip Ganassi Racing.

Montoya, who won a race as a rookie in 2007 but fell five spots from his first-year finish to 25th last season, is currently 14th. Truex, who made his first Chase in '07 but fell to 15th last season, is 28th in the standings. Almirola, whose season is questionable due to lack of sponsorship, has two DNFs and is outside the critical top 35 in owners' points, 36th in the drivers' standings.

"The biggest thing we got going for us is, due to the schedule, that keeps us sane, because if you had time to sit and think about it, you might lose your mind," EGR competition director Steve Hmiel said. "Honestly, the fact that we're gone so much and concentrating on racing so much keeps you from sitting around wondering about what's going to happen next -- because what's going to happen next is going to happen in about the next five seconds.

"We've had some success with the cars. The 1 has had some terrible luck but they've had fast cars; the 42 hasn't had great luck but they're 14th in the points and Aric is doing a great job with the race cars, we've just got to make sure we can keep it funded properly so they can continue on.

"Chevrolet's been a great help to us and the [Earnhardt-Childress Racing] engines have been terrific, so there are an awful lot of positives around our program. If you sat and worried about it or just added up the negatives, you probably wouldn't be a racer anyways. But the racer in me says there's a light at the end of the tunnel and it's not an oncoming train. We think we're running pretty good and the guys are working together great."

But there's the question of cars with their genesis as DEI pieces and the others that were CGR chassis.

"It's been a difficult year for the 1 car so far -- and the 8 car," Truex's crew chief, Kevin Manion, said. "Juan seems to be running pretty good. In this day and age, teammates are very important, and just getting out of our crew chief and drivers' meeting, we're still talking apples and oranges.

"When you can talk apples to apples, that's when you're going to see some improvements with this EGR team."

Hmiel, a four-decade veteran of the sport who most recently was part of the Ganassi organization, said a very simple two-pronged problem had kept the teams from having the same piece any sooner: too much rolling stock and too much development that needed to be done.

Hmiel said Truex and Montoya might be in "common cars" as early as in two weeks on the 1-mile Phoenix oval, or as late as the Sprint All-Star Race at Lowe's Motor Speedway in May.

Earnhardt Ganassi

2009 Results

	Truex	Montoya	Almirola
Starts	6	6	6
Wins	0	0	0
Top-5s	0	0	0
Top-10s	1	1	0
Fin. 21-30	3	1	2
Fin. 31-43	1	1	4
DNFs	0	0	2
Poles	1	0	0
Laps Led	2	1	0
Avg. Start	20.3	12.8	26.8
Avg. Finish	22.5	17.3	32.8
Points	28	14	36

"There's one done now that could go to Phoenix if they desire," Hmiel said. "We finished one Thursday morning before we came out [to Texas] and we finished another one [Friday]."

Hmiel chuckled when he recounted the scene from the team's Saturday debrief, saying Manion asked Hmiel if he could build him a common car and deliver it by Sunday -- the next day.

"Two-thirds of this business is emotion and how you perceive things," Hmiel said. "And if those drivers think they're going to be better with the good from this car and the good from that car, it's going to be great. But we couldn't force it until we refined all the things we already had in motion from last winter. I think probably as soon as Phoenix you'll see them both in the same car.

"We arrived at that decision pretty quickly, but they had a huge number of cars over at Earnhardt's -- 55 race cars and we weren't going to throw all those away -- and we had decided to rebuild our whole fleet over at CGR.

"There wasn't time and there was no performance advantage [because] at CGR there was something new on the car every 30 days. We watched to see how the performance was this year, took what was good out of this car and what was good out of that car, put them all together and built some really beautiful cars. We didn't want to build [a bunch] of new cars and have them be no good. We'd rather have six really nice cars per team."

"We might be spearheading that a little bit, because we needed a [front] clip after Martinsville so we just said, 'Hey, it's only a few weeks away so let's start switching some stuff over,'" Manion said. "We're three individual teams right now, with the 1 and the 8 being the closest, but still different; and in order to help each other -- because Juan has been very helpful and I think Martin wants to be helpful, as well.

"But when we're talking, we run completely different cars and completely different setups. I'm not saying that once we go to the common car that we'll be able to run the same setup, but at least you'll be able to talk apples to apples."

"The communication is going to get better," Truex said. "I don't think, right now, that it's where we want it to be. We're still doing things so much different that we can't really work together really well. We compare setups and the guys are open about what they've got, but all our stuff is so much different right now that it's not helping us, really."

"Terrible," Truex said of his season's first six races, in which his best finish is 10th at Atlanta. "We're not running as good as we want to, obviously. Atlanta we were running really good; Vegas, we beat ourselves but we were running really well -- the best we've ever run there.

"The last two weeks beat us down pretty well, the short tracks. We haven't run well and we haven't finished well, so it's been tough. The guys are working hard and I'm trying to do my part to try to get it turned around. As far as I can tell, everybody's doing OK."

Despite sitting pretty on the final Happy Hour time sheet, Manion said there was still some uncertainty for Sunday.

"It was good to see us both in the top 10," Manion said. "We still struggled a little bit on the long runs, though it seemed to have good initial speed in both [practices]. First practice we were too loose, and in the second, too tight; so if we can get it right and hit it in the middle, we should have a good day."

"I love Texas and I'm excited to be here," Truex said before he qualified 31st, which is a continuation of his season's maladies. "We've never been on this side of the garage [with cars lower in points]. It's time to get things going and this is the perfect place for it. We've always run well here, I really enjoy the track and barring some mechanical failure or bad luck, I think we'll have a great [race]."

Hmiel did say some little things might make a difference while EGR waits for its common chassis.

"We have to execute better on Sundays," Hmiel said. "It's like any team -- when your game day is here, you have to do a better job. We're getting caught up in some things that aren't our fault, but maybe if we weren't running in that position on the race track we wouldn't have been caught up in 'em.

"Our pit stops need to get a little better, though our race strategy has been good. We have the weekdays in good shape -- Fridays and Saturdays we run well, but on Sundays we have to get more than we think we have coming to us, and so far we're getting a little bit less.

"But you still have a good feeling, like there's a future out there. Last year, that wasn't the case for everyone. We're here at the race track; we're enjoying ourselves and doing what we want to do. You could be eat up with what's going to happen next, but the truth is, things happen minute-to-minute, you do the best job that you can and you keep your head up."

Speeds
• Practice 2 | Final Practice