Ragan hopes to rediscover magic with new crew chief

It all seemed so easy.

After finishing fifth in the Daytona 500 in 2007, his rookie season, David Ragan nearly earned a coveted spot in the Chase for the Sprint Cup in 2008. It all seemed to be serving as a natural springboard for a bigger and better 2009.

David Ragan

Cup Stats (full seasons)

	2007	2008	2009
Wins	0	0	0
Top-5s	2	6	0
Top-10s	3	14	2
Laps Led	2	27	4
Lead-Lap Fin.	16	25	16
DNFs	4	2	4
Avg. Start	29.1	17.4	26.9
Avg. Finish	24.5	15.6	24.4
Points Rank	23	13	27

This time last year, in fact, Ragan was the chic pick to be a Chase party crasher. He was young, fast and on a steady move upward -- and a sixth-place finish in the season-opening Daytona 500 did nothing but endorse this belief in his own mind and throughout the Sprint Cup garage.

"We were feeling really good about everything," Ragan admitted.

Two races later, the nightmare that would constitute most of the rest of the season began when Ragan's No. 6 Ford blew an engine, relegating him to a 42nd-place finish at Las Vegas. He wouldn't post another top-10 until grabbing seventh in the Pepsi 500 at Auto Club Speedway seven months later. By then, all that could do was move him from 31st in the point standings to 28th.

It also was his last top-10 of the season, giving him 12 fewer than he posted in 2008. He also had six top-five finishes in '08 with Jimmy Fennig as his crew chief, but none in '09 -- prompting car owner Jack Roush to look at other options for the entire No. 6 team heading into 2010.

Roush ended up giving Fennig a new position higher up the company food chain, and bringing in veteran Donnie Wingo to be Ragan's new crew chief.

"The first thing I want to say is that Jimmy Fennig is a great crew chief and David would not have had the year he had in 2008 without Jimmy Fennig," Roush said. "Jimmy Fennig was absolutely the perfect guy to get David started, and he did a great job with him.

"In 2009, when they didn't hit it off right away, when they didn't have the success they wanted, it seemed to me that the communication wasn't as good as they wanted or as good as it had been in 2008. So that relationship, that chemistry between the two didn't advance as I had hoped that it would."

That was when Roush first started thinking about what he could do to make their situation better, and in his mind, hopefully the entire Roush Fenway Racing operation more efficient.

"When we looked at what we could to make ourselves better in 2010, we needed to have really strong management in research and development and all the wind-tunnel testing, and all the things that end up happening behind the scenes," Roush said. "So I had to pick a guy with great experience and great depth and great knowledge to lead that group. Jimmy Fennig was the perfect guy -- and it gave me an opportunity to try Donnie Wingo, who also has great experience and has had great success, with David Ragan.

"So we're going to try Donnie Wingo with David Ragan to see if we can reestablish the magic and the chemistry that Jimmy had with David when they were at their best, and move a step forward." (Continued)