Around Michael Waltrip Racing, don't even think of uttering the F-word. People hear it, and they bristle. They get angry. They threaten to wash out your mouth with the foulest-tasting industrial-strength soap they can find. There's no place for that kind of language at the 3-year-old NASCAR organization.

The word in question being "fluke," of course, the term some have applied to the success of the Waltrip team through the first three weeks of the Sprint Cup season. David Reutimann hasn't placed worse than 14th, and last weekend at Las Vegas recorded the first top-five finish of his career. The driver of the No. 00 car ranks fifth in points entering Sunday's race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, while teammate Waltrip stands on the Chase bubble in 12th position. Although the organization may not yet have turned the corner, it certainly seems to be peeking around it.

It's an early season surge no one outside the walls of Waltrip Raceworld would have expected, especially after seeing the two drivers finish 22nd and 29th, respectively, in final points last season. But a pole for Reutimann in the 2008 finale at Homestead, a flurry of personnel moves throughout the last year, and markedly faster cars on the race track have officials with the Waltrip organization thinking about race wins and playoff positions -- things that flukes just don't do.

"We have said as an organization that we think we will win three races this year," vice president and general manager Ty Norris stated flatly. "People look at us like, that's crazy with Kyle Busch winning all these races, you've got Jimmie Johnson, you've got Jeff Gordon back on his game. I said, look at the lap speeds. If you just watched the lap speeds at California, if you watched them at Las Vegas, even back to last year. We started gaining a tremendous amount of momentum last fall, and you started seeing David Reutimann in that mix all the time. We would make a mistake on pit road or make a mistake somewhere else, but the lap times were always there, very, very fast. So that's what tells us that we can win races, and what tells us that we're not a fluke. It shows us that David Reutimann and Michael Waltrip have a legitimate shot at the Chase this year."

The turnaround, Norris believes, has been a gradual process. While a stable rules package from NASCAR and a ban on sanctioned testing helped the organization catch up financially and technically, personnel hires have made the biggest difference. Last April brought the arrival of engineering director Nick Hughes, now the team's technical director, who Norris says has brought Waltrip's engineering department more in line with the likes of Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing. Mike Clark, who heads up manufacturing and fabrication, came on board and has delivered cars built on time that fit NASCAR templates. And this past September, Steve Hallam, the former head of race operations at the McLaren Formula One team, was hired as Waltrip's director of race engineering. (Continued)