These Cowboys aren’t riding high yet

Troy Aikman and Roger Staubach know what it means to win -- they’re in the NFL Hall of Fame -- and what it means to lose. It helps for them to know both, now that they’re in the Nextel Cup Series.

The two former Dallas Cowboys quarterbacks, along with Bill Saunders, own Hall of Fame Racing, which got into NASCAR’s premier series last year with the No. 96 Chevrolet.

It was a rocky debut, and their sophomore year also got off to a poor start last week when their car, driven by Tony Raines, finished 33rd in the season-opening Daytona 500, several laps behind winner Kevin Harvick.

They’re hoping to improve Sunday at the Auto Club 500 at California Speedway in Fontana. Qualifying for the race is today.

“Our expectations are certainly higher going into this year than what they were a year ago,” Aikman said in an interview last week at the Daytona International Speedway.

The California Speedway, a two-mile, D-shaped oval, also will be the site of the San Bernardino County 200 Craftsman Truck Series race tonight, and the Stater Bros. 300 Busch Series race Saturday.

Last year, Hall of Fame Racing’s driving duties were split between Raines -- a newcomer to the Cup level at 42 -- and veteran Terry Labonte, who drove the car in seven races in his final year in the Cup series.

Neither won a race and each had only one top-10 finish. Labonte was 34th of 43 drivers a year ago in the Auto Club 500, and Raines was 37th in the Sony HD 500 Labor Day race at California Speedway.

In the team’s season highlight, Labonte finished third after nearly winning the road-course event at Infineon Raceway in June.

But Labonte and Raines also kept the car in competition. The team failed to reach the checkered flag in only one of last season’s 36 races. That enabled Hall of Fame Racing to finish a respectable 26th in the owners’ points.

Labonte has retired, Raines is now the team’s full-time driver and Aikman said he and his partners foresee considerable improvement in 2007.

“I don’t sense that we’re losing patience,” Aikman said. “Not that we don’t want to accelerate our success, but we all recognized how difficult it would be and what a challenge it would be.

“But the guys are very upbeat and positive,” said Aikman, a former UCLA quarterback who led the Cowboys to three Super Bowl victories in the 1990s. “We want to be a top-20 team, we’re hopeful we can win a race this year and we’re hopeful we can have more top-fives and top-10s.”

As for Raines?

“We’re very, very pleased with the job that he’s done,” Aikman said. “He’s not a young guy -- he’s in his early 40s -- and he knows that time is running out to achieve the things he wants. He’s hungry, which is what you got to have.

“This is a guy who probably hadn’t been given all the pieces to give himself a chance to be successful” before joining Hall of Fame Racing, “and as a former quarterback I can understand how that can happen.”

Raines said that, beginning with the Auto Club 500, “We need to run better than we did last year. I feel like we’ll be better, I really do.”

He acknowledged that there were times last year when he was more focused on preserving the car, and earning points for his team, than charging for the lead.

“Sometimes I work so hard trying not to make mistakes that I’m not putting it out there every lap, every race,” said Raines, a LaPorte, Ind., native who was the 1999 Busch Series rookie of the year and a four-time winner in the Craftsman Truck Series.

“We want to bump up the bar. If you don’t aim high, you won’t shoot high,” he said.

“I’ve told Troy and Roger both that I’m not claiming to be a Jeff Gordon and win a bunch of races” in a single year, Raines said. “But I think I’m a very capable driver and I’ve been around long enough to know how to do it.”

Qualifying for the Auto Club 500 is scheduled to start at 3:10 this afternoon, after both the Cup and Busch cars have practiced and the trucks have qualified. Matt Kenseth, driver of the No. 17 Ford for Roush Fenway Racing, is the defending winner.

Two more rounds of Cup practice are scheduled Saturday, followed by the Busch race at 4:30 p.m.

The Auto Club 500 is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. Sunday.

james.peltz@latimes.com