DALE JARRETT Brand new team brings same old results

The 47-year-old driver has just two top-10 finishes this season.
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- This was supposed to be a big rebound year for Dale Jarrett.
Coming off a 26th-place finish last season that resembled his early years more than his championship form of seven straight top-10 finishes, Jarrett brought a new crew chief and a revamped racing team into 2004.
So far, at least in the standings, it's not looking like the good old days for the 1999 NASCAR champ.
Jarrett goes into next week's race at Martinsville ranked 20th in the NASCAR Nextel Cup standings, 311 points behind leader Kurt Busch. He has just two top-10 finishes, no wins and no poles after finishing 18th in Texas. But Jarrett and team owner Robert Yates say they're miles ahead of last year's troubled season. They blame the slow start on bad luck and the painful process of overhauling the once-proud operation that won 26 races from 1996-02.
Reasons for optimism
"If you look at the points, you might not see any difference," Jarrett said. "But we could have very easily finished in the top 10 in every race. That gives us hope that there are a lot of good things in the future."
Among the reasons for optimism is the return of crew chief Mike Ford, an original member of Jarrett's crew when he joined Yates in 1995. Ford left Yates in 2000 and helped Bill Elliott to four wins and 41 top-10 finishes. Now he's continually fine-tuning Jarrett's new faster engine, Yates said.
New general manager Eddie D'Hondt also was hired late last year, and has recruited top talent for Jarrett's revamped pit crew.
"We've rebuilt it and it'll soon be solid," said Yates, whose team did get a victory at Texas Motor Speedway with Elliott Sadler. "I have a lot of confidence in the drivers, a lot of confidence in the teams. We know Dale can get it done. We know Mike can get it done."
Bad breaks
This season, bad breaks have gotten the best of Jarrett.
At Rockingham, a design problem led to little pebbles shredding belts and Jarrett came in 40th in the only race he didn't finish. At Darlington, several tires went flat and he finished 32nd.
Jarrett was hoping to turn things around in Texas, where he won in 2001 and has two second-place finishes. Instead, he hovered around 20th and failed to lead for the first time in eight TMS appearances.
He said the No. 88 Ford just never did feel right in Texas.
"The car just pushed off the corner all day," he said. We kept adjusting and a few times we made it better, but in the end it just wasn't very good."
It's tough for Jarrett, 47, to essentially start over.
After all, he has won 31 races, with 152 top-five finishes and 237 top-10s, since his rookie season in 1987.
"You'd like to think that when you reach a certain plateau, you wouldn't come back down, but we did," he said. "I don't know how much longer I'm going to do this. I don't want to look at it as a three- to four-year rebuilding program. I might not have the patience to do that."
Heading south
Jarrett is trying to end a slide that began after he won his only season title. He finished fourth the next season, then fifth, and ninth before bottoming out last year.
Last season started out with some promise, with a win at Rockingham in the third race. But then things got rough, as Jarrett finished 20th or lower in 22 of the next 33 races and had no more top five finishes. His last three finishes were 29th, 38th and 26th.
"We just weren't very competitive," Jarrett said. "We went to the track not knowing what we had. You have to understand how far down we were to understand how far back we've come."
The disastrous 2003 season was the end result of years of dismantling Jarrett's championship team, Yates said.
"Championship teams get sought after by other teams," Yates said. "We didn't hold onto them and didn't bring up any new guys and just fell behind technologically."
Jarrett knows the experience will help his comeback. But that doesn't mean he'll like it.
"It helps," he said, "but I'm still a terrible loser."