After the first two races of the Sprint Cup season, David Ragan is a solid eighth in the point standings.

That's good, but not quite good enough -- sort of like his 17th-place finish in last Sunday's Auto Club 500 at Auto Club Speedway in California. Ragan knew it could have been better.

“

It's mandatory to win a race this year. It will be devastating if we conclude the season without a win.

”

DAVID RAGAN

"I thought we had a top-10 car all night," he said. "But then we had a bad pit stop on a green-flag stop and I got into the wall and we just ran into some bad circumstances. We got a lap down and couldn't ever rebound. At times we had a top-seven or top-eight car, but when you get that far behind and you don't have many cautions to catch back up, it just made for a tough night."

Ragan, at 23 and in only his third full-time season, remains one of the youngest drivers in the Cup Series. But after finishing 13th in points last year -- just one spot removed from the coveted Chase for the Sprint Cup championship -- Ragan welcomes the high expectations that others have placed on him for this season.

He not only welcomes them, but agrees with them. Heading into this Sunday's Shelby 427 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Ragan figures it is only a matter of time until he reaches Victory Lane for the first time. At least it better be, he is quick to add.

"It's mandatory to win a race this year. It will be devastating if we conclude the season without a win," said Ragan, who earned one of his 14 top-10 finishes last season at Las Vegas when he came home in seventh.

Team owner Jack Roush of Roush Fenway Racing, which fields Ragan's No. 6 Ford, said that he expects Ragan to win soon, too. But he stopped short of endorsing Ragan's assessment that it would be "devastating" if he doesn't.

"Devastation is a hard thing. It's hard for me to put a metric on that," Roush said. "Certainly I would be disappointed. They would be the victim of unbelievable bad luck or mismanagement on my part if we let that happen. I'm determined not to mismanage him and hopefully the luck will work out for us." (Continued)