Ryan Newman News and Information

CHARLOTTE - Ryan Newman and new crew chief Roy McCauley expect to vault back into the top tier of the standings this season, with Newman exuding confidence and McCauley speaking optimistically of wins coming to his Penske Racing team.

That’s good news for the group that closed the 2007 NASCAR Cup season on the cusp of victory, but one that has gone without a win for the past two seasons. During that time, the group has seen changes though, both internally and to its Dodges, that have kept them chasing the consistency that pushed Newman into victory lane eight times in 2003 and made him a consistent championship contender before the past two seasons.

In 2007, Newman surged at the end of the season and finished the season 13th in the standings, the highest a driver not in the Chase could finish, with seven top-five and 15 top-10 finishes.

Now, though, Newman is hoping to be a threat again. McCauley is back in a crew chief role - he opened last season with Newman’s teammate, Kurt Busch, but took a different role with the team to attend to family matters early in the season - with a driver he says he relates to and understands.

While one might assume that’s because both Newman and McCauley have engineering degrees, the crew chief says there is another reason.

“I was a racer long before I was an engineer,” McCauley said. “I got an engineering degree by accident, to be honest with you. I was a racer long before I was an engineer. I would say we have common ground and more common paths. I would say that what makes it easier for us to communicate is we’re both racers. We share a lot of common backgrounds in how we grew up and the experiences we’ve been through. That helps. From a race car standpoint, Ryan is very informative as to how he feels, but that’s because he’s a racer.”

In 2005, McCauley was crew chief for Newman’s Busch Series team, with the two winning six races. Both expect to return to that type of performance this season. Ask Newman what type of track most favors his team and he doesn’t even try to sort them out.

“All of them,” he said Tuesday during a stop on the annual NASCAR Sprint Cup media tour. “Honestly, I think that we’ll be great at all of them. Always our question has been qualifying on restrictor-plate tracks. I think we’ve had a good package there in the last two or two-a-and-half years racing here, and our qualifying package has been our weakest performance part, at least in the last two years.”

McCauley is confident as well. He’s glad to be back in a crew chief role and looking forward to taking on the season.

He’s also confident the team can be a contender in 2008.

“We’re going to win some races,” he said. “We’ve had some good tests. It’s not going to be without it’s problems. There’s going to be some ups and downs; nothing is ever going to be perfect. I feel like the team is strong enough to where we can get through those down moments and get back to the high ones. To me, the measure of a good team is how well they react to adversity, and I think Penske, on the whole as an organization, I think is doing very well at that.

“We’ve brought it back a long ways. I’ve seen the dark side … We just want to get back to where we know we can be and we got back some of that last year. Grace under pressure is patience, to work through the problem to the point where you understand what was wrong and get back and understand how you got there. I think that’s helped us quite a bit.”