A little earlier this season, a pretty significant Cup Series success streak ended when Kevin Harvick failed to finish at Auto Club Speedway, snapping his string of 81 consecutive races running at the finish.

Upstate New Yorker Regan Smith is enough of a student of the sport to respect what Harvick accomplished. Same goes for Richard Childress Racing teammate Clint Bowyer, who owns the current active streak with 79 consecutive races.

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I guess I could p--- and moan about not racing all the time, and people would understand -- but I still have goals and I still feel like I can win at the Cup level.

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REGAN SMITH

But Smith is far too humble to call any attention to his own achievement. In his entire 43-race Cup Series career, which stretches across three seasons, Smith has never failed to finish a race. That puts him in fairly select company. Jeff Burton, Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon are three respected, decorated veterans. All three wrecked out of their first Cup starts. So much for streaks

"Regan was amazing in that category," said veteran mechanic Clyde McLeod, who was the No. 01 shop foreman in 2008. "That whole team was a real special team. We had some neat people there, but when I was brought in there, we were in trouble. We weren't in the top 35. We were about 60 points out on Martinsville weekend and his cars weren't like the other DEI cars -- they needed somebody who knew the DEI stuff, so they brought me in."

McLeod's task, after switching over from DEI's Camping World East and Nationwide programs, was to get Smith back on track, to get him back into the top 35 and to keep him there. And that's exactly what the combination did, with a bonus.

"We had no plans to win rookie of the year, and we won it," McLeod said of Smith, who won over IndyCar champions Sam Hornish Jr. and Dario Franchitti, along with Patrick Carpentier and Michael McDowell. "We worked through a lot with three different crew chiefs, and we didn't have great cars all the time. But Regan didn't wreck 'em -- he'd finish. We had a [driveshaft] yoke come through the radiator at Dover, nothing Regan could do and we changed the radiator and got him back out in 12 minutes. It was just a special team.

"We didn't know that a rookie had never been able to finish all the races before. But it was something the team got to cherish and it was pretty cool. We're trying to do something with Regan, too, on the Nationwide side [at DEI] so we've got a lot of things going on."

That would suit Smith just fine, as the Cato, N.Y., native has plenty of time on his hands these days. He's only racing a part-time Sprint Cup program with Furniture Row Racing, the team based in Colorado that this season decided to do about half the schedule, hoping to run better when it raced. (Continued)