Ragan's breakthrough comes at Martinsville

“I feel like we’ve underperformed the last three or four weeks,” said Ragan, who carved his way toward the front after starting 20th Sunday. “A lot of it has been just mistakes on my behalf, mistakes on the team’s behalf. And we’ve been really good. We’ve had some good speed and we’ve had top-10 cars, but we just haven’t been able to have a good, entire weekend. Finally, we put together a good race where we weren’t very good Friday and Saturday. We put together a good race, and that’s what’s the most important.”

Ragan’s effort was rewarded with a well-deserved “attaboy” on pit road from team owner Coach Joe Gibbs, who watched Denny Hamlin lay down a celebratory burnout after notching the first victory in nearly a year for both Toyota and JGR. But it was also a long-awaited payoff for Ragan, who marked his first top-five outing in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series since May 5, 2013, when he scored the lone victory for his regular team, Front Row Motorsports.

While the 29-year-old journeyman has had to adjust to a new team and a new manufacturer, he’s also had to adapt to racing among the front-running crowd on a weekly basis.

“I’ve been frustrated. We’ve just been working trying to understand the limits that I can go,” Ragan said. “Being on a team that’s used to running 25th, you have to change the way you drive. You’re racing a whole different ‘nother group of cars, and so trying to gain the respect from some of these guys in the top 10, it goes a long way to finally get a good finish here.”

Ragan admitted there have been occasions in his five-race foray where he’s pushed beyond those limits, citing his run-in with Jeff Gordon the previous week at Auto Club Speedway at Exhibit A.

“I think that I’ve probably overdriven it at times a little bit,” Ragan said. “I think California was a good example — I probably should’ve let the 24 go and just ride, but I was racing him, and he took advantage of a bad situation for me, and I was the one that was coming off of Turn 4 sideways, not him. Just situations like that have really prevented us from having, I think, a couple of top-10s here, so at the end of the day, you’ve got to have good cars, you’ve got to have a mistake-free day on pit road, and I’ve got to have a mistake-free race. And I think we did that.

“If we can work on it a little bit, I think we’ve still got a good chance to win one of these races the next month or so.”

It might be a jump to conclusions to assess “the next month or so” as a hint to when Busch, who suffered multiple leg fractures in a crash during the season-opening NASCAR XFINITY Series race, will resume driving duties in the No. 18. Ragan said plenty of factors would weigh into Busch’s return to competition, but that he hopes he remains the interim driver until that moment.

“I know Kyle’s back home watching, and when he sees a Toyota back in Victory Lane, he’s probably doing therapy right now, trying to get back,” Ragan said. “I know it’s for a few more weeks, and it’s kind of week-by-week on how Kyle’s feeling and certainly that’s a Kyle Busch decision, a Coach Gibbs decision and the medical staff.

“There’s probably a lot of different scenarios that could play out. Obviously, I hope that I’m in the car until the transition for Kyle comes back, and I think that’s what the team and everybody wants — they don’t want to have to put a third or a fourth or fifth driver in, so hopefully Kyle can heal well and he’ll be back sooner than later, and we would have won a race and I can go back to the Front Row Motorsports guys and carry a Chase ticket back home. That’d be cool.”

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