DOVER, Del. -- David Reutimann climbed out of his race car after 400 long, physical laps at Dover International Speedway, leaned against the driver's side window ledge, and took a long pull on a beverage handed to him by a team representative. Then he gave a thumbs-up.

"We had to stop the bleeding sometime," the Michael Waltrip Racing driver said, "and hopefully we did it this time."

“

Our year has been terrible. We've run really, really well, and we just haven't been able to finish. Things break, and things like that. It feels good to finally get a finish where we were running for a change.

”

-- DAVID REUTIMANN

Sunday's 400-miler at Dover brought a much-needed fifth-place finish for Reutimann, his best result since placing fifth in the Daytona 500. The races in between have been a struggle, with three engine problems and zero top-10s, a humbling period for a team that entered the season with legitimate Chase aspirations and won the Coca-Cola 600 a year ago next week.

"Our year has been terrible," Reutimann said bluntly. "We've run really, really well, and we just haven't been able to finish. Things break, and things like that. It feels good to finally get a finish where we were running for a change."

It was sorely needed. Although Reutimann had placed in the top 20 the previous three weeks, a run of early-season mechanical trouble -- overheating at Atlanta, and engine failure at Bristol and Texas -- had sunk him to 24th in points coming to Dover. This from a program that was in the running for a Chase berth for most of last season, ultimately missing the playoff by 153 points.

"Every time we've blown up, we were running in the top five," crew chief Rodney Childers said. "That's basically 300 points we gave up. You take where we are at right now and add 300 to it, and we'd be about seventh. So I think everybody knows what we've got. We've just got to keep it up."

They did just that Sunday, when Reutimann started 13th and battled among the leaders for most of the race. He ran as high as third, and was fifth with 40 laps remaining, but Reutimann said his car tightened up on the final long run of a race that featured only five cautions.

"The downside is, that's the worst we were in the long run all day," he said on pit road immediately after the event. "When it counted, we needed the car to be good, and the car was just too tight. All in all, the way things have been going for our year, we've been running really, really well and haven't been able to get the finishes to show for it. I'm really proud of my guys, and hopefully we can build on this a little bit and go onto the next one here and get some good finishes."

The finish lifted Reutimann four positions in points to 20th, the highest he's been since the fourth week of the season. Childers can only shake his head and think of what might have been.

"We've just had a lot of things go wrong this year," Childers said. "We've blown up three times. Just a lot of goofy stuff. Last week [at Darlington] we had a lot of goofy stuff, and just when we came down pit road, the caution came out and basically cost us another top five. We've just got to keep doing what were doing. We've got good cars, and we deserve better finishes than what we've had earlier this year, so we just have to keep rolling."

One positive? The team knows what it's capable of, Childers said, so maintaining confidence isn't a problem.

"With this team, it's been the easiest of any I've ever dealt with," the crew chief said. "Everybody knows we've got good cars. Everybody knows we've got a shot at the pole every week, we've got a shot at winning every week. When you can do that, it's easy to keep the confidence up. We've got a good group of guys and good race cars in the shop. So it's been pretty easy, really."