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MICHAEL WALTRIP RACING TARGETS CHASE IN 2011

In 2010, Michael Waltrip Racing knocked on the door once again. In 2011, the goal will be to burst through that door and place a car in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup for a first time.

MWR NASCAR Sprint Cup drivers David Reutimann (18th place in points) and new signing Martin Truex (22nd) both had solid seasons in 2010, with Reutimann dominating at Chicagoland Speedway to win his second career Cup race.

But continuing the kind of consistent progress that the team made in both 2008 and ’09 proved challenging, and both drivers fell just short of a Chase slot.

Running well wasn’t the issue for the MWR Toyota Camrys, which were plenty speedy all year long; finishing strong consistently was.

The season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway was a perfect metaphor for the team’s season: Reutimann had one of the fastest cars all weekend, but an incident early on dashed the hopes of the Aaron’s Dream Machine No. 00 crew, while Truex led 62 laps, until a late-race flat tire dropped his No. 56 NAPA Auto Parts Toyota to 11th in the final running.

“Tums were necessary after that one,” team boss Waltrip recalls ruefully. “So much hope and so much promise and then to not come up with much of a result. Sorta says a lot about what the 2010 season was about.”

But as Waltrip is fond of saying, the team continues to build a foundation, adding proven race-winner Truex and successful crew chief Pat Tryson for 2010, with more to come next season.

Most of all, no one on the team has forgotten just how far Michael Waltrip Racing has come since the early days of 2007, when the team barely made it through its first season.

“To stand 10 feet tall, you say it only takes 10 feet,” says MWR Executive Vice President of Business Development and General Manager Ty Norris. “But for us, we’d buried ourselves so deep in the ground, we were five-and-a-half feet towards being buried six feet under. We’ve had to go fifteen-and-a-half feet to get to stand 10 feet tall.”

That’s the main reason Waltrip uses the word “foundation” so often. The still-youthful MWR team is building the type of foundation that the giants of the sport have had decades to work on. The team remains very much a work in progress – not that that’s a bad thing, mind you.

Tryson, a veteran of Penske Racing and Roush Fenway Racing, likes what he sees with MWR.

“As an organization, I feel like we are stronger than Penske,” he says. “Obviously, we don’t have four cars, and Hendrick is still the team that everybody is gunning for, but I feel like we’re further ahead than Penske, just because we’ve got more than one car that runs good. We have two cars that run good right now.”

For next season, the foundation will continue to grow. Ryan Truex, Martin’s younger brother and the two-time defending K&N Pro Series East champion, will move up to the NASCAR Nationwide Series in 2011. His replacement will be a talented 18-year-old from Iowa, Brett Moffitt.

There will be additional excitement next season, when former X Games star Travis Pastrana runs a seven-race Nationwide schedule with the newly renamed Pastrana-Waltrip Racing squad. And then in 2012, Pastrana will run a total of 20 races with the team.

“I've been following NASCAR closely for years as a fan of the sport, with competing in it a lifelong dream,” says Pastrana, winner of 16 X-Games gold medals. “I decided it was time to try and turn that dream into reality.”

Add it all up, and the team can hardly wait for Daytona Speedweeks next February.

“We feel really good about our fourth (season),” says Waltrip. “We feel like going into 2011, we can be Chase guys and we can race those cars up towards the front and we can win multiple races.”

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