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Roush Fenway Racing’s Jamie McMurray admits that it has been a struggle at times.

Like all NASCAR Sprint Cup drivers, he entered the year with high expectations. McMurray had grounds for his, though, after his team won at Daytona last July and earned nine top-10 finishes en route to a 17th position in the final Cup standings. Certainly that wasn’t all that he and the team hoped for, but it was a sign of improvement within his group and a source of confidence entering 2008.

Things didn’t start off that well, though.

After an offseason in which he not only spoke of heightened expectations for this season, but one in which he also detailed his continued rigorous mental and physical conditioning program, McMurray endured an early run that left him 36th in the point standings and forced him to make the race based on qualifying speed at Martinsville Speedway. McMurray rose to the occasion, qualifying fifth and running with the leaders before finishing a season-high eighth.

Since then, he’s not enjoyed another run of that significance, but he has clawed his way to 23rd in the point standings.

As McMurray looks over his opening 11 points races, he says that he and his Larry Carter-led team are not doing anything different.

Things just happen to be working out better for them these days.

“We had five races where we had some things go wrong with our car – some of it self-inflicted,” he said. “But like at Las Vegas, I spun out avoiding a wreck and slid through the infield that didn’t really tear the outside of our car up, but it broke an exhaust pipe. So I ran the rest of the day with seven cylinders basically … we just had five races where things just didn’t go right, and that got us way behind.

“Our cars have been fast, and they’re probably even faster than where we finished. We haven’t been able to really put it together at the end of the race, so we feel really good about a lot of these tracks coming up.”

He believes that his Ford, like the other Roush Fenway entrants, has enough speed to be a contender in the races. He also looks down the road and sees some tracks that he feels lean toward his strengths. McMurray, 31, believes that the summer months will be good to his team.

“With the road courses coming up and some of these other tracks that I really like and maybe some other guys struggle at, it should be a really good summer for us,” he said. “I just can’t emphasize enough that the cars have been really quick, and that’s the hardest part of this sport, especially with the car of tomorrow and making your cars to where they drive decent enough to run good lap times. Our practices have gone really well, and our pit stops have been good. You just have to put all of that together in a race weekend and be consistent at that, so we have to work on that.”

Charlotte will be the first test. McMurray didn’t have the greatest all-star outing – he finished 19th – but that was a 100-lap segmented race. This weekend, the teams return to Lowe’s Motor Speedway once more, this time for the series' longest race, the Coca-Cola 600.

Carter said that the team expects a stronger performance this weekend.

“We missed a couple of things last weekend that really put us behind in the race,” he said. “We certainly had a car more than capable of running in the top 10 and even in the top five. Hopefully, we can put last weekend behind us and go out there this weekend and put some better numbers up on the board.”

Aiding in that effort will be McMurray.

Through all the setbacks, McMurray has managed to remain focused.

While it hasn’t always been easy, McMurray has found a way to find the bright spots and the faith to believe that more are coming.

That’s played as large of a role in the team’s recent rally as anything else has.

“It’s mentally draining, but, at the same time, when we ran those races, in practice you thought, ‘Wow, we have a car that can finish in the top 10 today,’ and it didn’t work out in the race,” he said. “So it would be way more frustrating if you were one of the teams that when they unload every week they’re 30th in practice, and they race their hearts out, and they’re till 30th when the day is over.

“So, fortunately for us, our cars have been fast enough that you’ve seen promise.”