MWR beaming with pride after top-10s at Daytona (cont'd)

"Restarts were wild, I can tell you that," Truex said grinning widely. "I had a lot of fun out there [Sunday]. Proud of the team -- our pit stops were amazing. For our first race together I would say it was an A-plus-plus. I just had a lot of fun."

Even when Harvick hooked him, took him out of his way and wouldn't let go. Not surprisingly, Truex -- a racer's racer -- laughed and said he "would have done the same thing" to win the Daytona 500.

"I came about a half-inch from wrecking. Harvick was pushing me and I knew he wasn't going to push me to the win," Truex said. "He was doing what he had to do to win. I felt him pull off of my bumper and I tried to block, but I couldn't get there quick enough. He had me hooked and turning me and turning me and turning me. I just couldn't quite get down in front of him. He was just kind of holding me there.

"It was what I expected -- a lot of torn-up cars, a whole lot of fun and I'm sure the fans got their money's worth."

Imagine the delight of his teammate David Reutimann, who had scrambled and line-jumped all day and on the second attempt at a green-white-checkered finish, ended up in fifth place -- his best Daytona result in seven career Cup starts at his home-state track.

"Those restarts were just killing us toward the end and we couldn't do anything right and I couldn't get in the right line and things kept getting messed up," Reutimann said. "Thankfully we got where we needed to be when it counted and it ended up working out pretty well.

There has to be a flip side to every coin and so it was for Waltrip. The final green-white-checkered resulted in Waltrip losing what seemed a sure top-15 finish.

"We were a little off at the start, but we worked on it and got it pretty good," Kennedy said. "The mid-point of the race we decided 'surely there's going to be a big wreck,' so we decided to just lay back. And then, with seven to go, he started to take off and got up to 13th, and somewhere on the backstretch somebody got into him, so..."

So it was 18th. But the bottom line, it's got the whole organization licking its chops at the prospect of Auto Club Speedway this weekend.

"It was so cool to see Martin and David up there battling," Waltrip said. "It's just really a proud accomplishment. David did a great job there at the end and Martin looked like he could win the race. We really feel like what we've learned in the offseason tells us that next week should be fun as well with our testing and what our boys have done and learned."