DARLINGTON, S.C. -- It's a pretty good sign when a driver is disappointed with a career-best run at Darlington Raceway and his second-best finish of the season.

That was the case for Regan Smith, who wound up 17th in Saturday night's Showtime Southern 500 but knew as soon as he climbed from the car that he deserved better. As team members continued to come up to him to offer congratulations, Smith was trying to offer apologies.

He shouldn't have bothered. Smith ran inside the top 10 for much of the second half of the race, but a decision to go with a two-tire stop on the team's final trip to the pits wound up costing him when the car's handling went away. So what could have been a great evening for Smith and Furniture Row Racing turned out merely to be very good.

"It was a good run," Smith said. "I'm a little bummed out over the finish, because we were sitting higher most of the night, but we got two tires and most of the other guys got four, and it just didn't work for us. We got really, really tight there at the end. But we've struggled for a couple of weeks now and had some bad luck at Talladega, so it was nice to have a good run. It's a step in the right direction."

Back-to-back lousy finishes had Smith's No. 78 Chevrolet sliding precariously closer to the cutoff for the guaranteed starting spots given to the teams in the top 35 in owners' points. But his run at Darlington gained him two positions -- up to 31st -- and some much-needed positive momentum heading into Dover.

Smith had been running with the leaders at Talladega when his engine suddenly went sour, leaving him with a 38th-place finish. And last week at Richmond, he struggled all evening and wound up 30th.

But Smith knew right from the moment that the car was unloaded from the hauler that he had a chassis capable of running with the big dogs.

"The car was strong," Smith said. "It was strong when we unloaded it and we just kept working on it from that point on. I don't have a ton of laps here, but I have enough to know what the right things to do are. You've got to have a car left at the end, and we did, so it was cool."

And when did he realize that a good finish might be in the cards?

"[Saturday] in practice," Smith said. "The car was that good in practice. So I figured if I didn't do anything too stupid, we'd be OK."

With newer equipment being added to the team's stable, Smith said the potential is now there for even more success.

"We're a young team, we're a new team," Smith said. "Everything is new to us, right down to the chassis that we're running and we're learning those. We're learning what I like in those chassis and I think we're starting to get that baseline that we need and we're just going to keep getting better."