Jerry Nadeau doesn’t want to be known for running well at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

But it’s hard to escape his connection to Atlanta, since many of his brighter moments in the Winston Cup series have come on the 1.54-mile speedway in Hampton, Ga.

He got his first victory in the fall race at the track in 2000, Nadeau’s first full season with Hendrick Motorsports. In classic fashion, he held off a charge from the late Dale Earnhardt.

Nadeau returned last season and played a pivotal role in the outcome of the spring race, which was won by then-rookie Kevin Harvick. In the final laps, Jeff Gordon, Nadeau, Harvick and Dale Jarrett took turns swapping the lead.

Last fall, Nadeau seemed a lock for another Winston Cup win at Atlanta, only to run out of gas on the race’s final lap.

The series makes its first stop of the season at Atlanta Sunday for the MBNA America 500.

“I don’t look at Atlanta any different than I look at any other racetrack,” Nadeau said. “We go there to do the best we can. For some reason, Atlanta well not just Atlanta, but the mile-and-a-half racetracks in general has been good to us.

“We seem like we have a pretty good knack for how we build our race cars for those races. We’ve won one, we finished third and should have won the one last year. It was a tough situation. I think we’re growing better as a team and we will not only run well at Atlanta [but at other tracks as well].

“I don’t want people to look at us because we run well at Atlanta. We want to run good everywhere that we go.”

Since joining Hendrick Motorsports as a teammate to Gordon, Terry Labonte and now Jimmie Johnson, Nadeau has proved he belongs in NASCAR’s top division. The thing he has lacked, however, has been consistency.

He finished 20th in series points in 2000, but scored just three top-five and four top-10 finishes, including his win at Atlanta. Last

season, Nadeau moved up to 17th in points, with four top-five and 10 top-10 finishes.

“We’ve been pretty competitive most of

the time. Almost everywhere we’ve been we’ve been fast. I think some of the drivers know that; some of the teams know that,” Nadeau said. “We’re trying to get more consistent, like a Jeff Gordon or Dale Jarrett, somebody that runs up front all the time.

“That’s where we’re trying to climb. For me that means a lot more. I’m not interested

in running in the back. I know there are some drivers who may enjoy just collecting a paycheck and running around, but (crew chief) Tony (Furr) and (car owner) Rick (Hendrick)know that I want to do well.”

Nadeau doesn’t like to dwell on the opportunities he and his team have missed.

“We should have won at a lot of other places,” he said. “I guess I don’t have as much luck as some other people do. We keep working at it as hard as anybody else. The way I look at it, we’re still pretty much a new team compared to many of these other veteran teams that have been together for a long time.

“We have a lot of new guys on this team. We have a new engineer, a new shock guy and a couple new mechanics. We need to get a good combination working so we can stay consistent.”