Spencer

Everybody says we can't win the championship or finish in the top-10 in points now that we've missed Daytona. When you go in with that attitude, you're defeated already. If anything, I think it made Team Target a lot stronger.

Chip Ganassi Racing has a good superspeedway program. We knew we were going to run good, buy you've got to look at luck, too -- and we were unlucky. In the second heat of the Gatorade 125s, we just got in with some cars that didn't know how to draft. I got hit from the back by the No. 59 car (of Bobby Gerhart), and Shawna Robinson ran into me. Maybe they weren't looking ahead of them and were just trying to hang on. It's just a tough situation.

I sat and watched the Daytona 500 last Sunday, and I enjoyed watching it. I wasn't going to do it. My wife and my two dogs and I sat there and it was a very intriguing race. The fun thing about the day was that my dogs had no clue what was going on. That's the only relief out of this whole picture. They just sat there beside me and we watched the race. We were pulling for Dodge and mostly for Sterling.

I don't think our season is over by any means. It's just starting, as a matter of fact. I think we're going to win some races and contend for the championship. We tested in Rockingham and ran pretty good. We tested at Atlanta and Vegas and ran pretty good at all three tracks. I think we'll run good at these next three tracks, and we'll run good at Talladega without a question. Those guys are building us some new Dodges right now, and we'll go to the wind tunnel and we'll be in good shape.

At North Carolina Speedway, you've got to run consistent. This track is just like Darlington. The minute you start to race your competitors, you get in trouble. You've got to have a car that handles real good, and that's what we did down here. We concentrated on race runs. I think we wore out eight sets of tires on long runs. We probably ran about 400 laps of race runs just on tires and shocks and trying stuff and learning what the Dodge likes. We feel like we came up with a pretty good combination, and we think we've got a car that's capable of running up front.

I qualified up front and that was a good start for the weekend. At the beginning of the race the ignition box went out. We were running 10th and that dropped us to 20th. Then we battled a loose car. If the ignition box hadn't gone out, we might have been able to stay on the lead lap.

We finished 20th and I think the car might have been better than that. We'll just have to try again next week at Vegas. We had a good test out there, so we'll see what happens.

Jimmy Spencer is the driver of the No. 41 Target Dodge Intrepid R/T. He will be providing a regular diary to ESPN.com throughout the Winston Cup season.