It seems things are getting back to normal for Bobby Labonte and his race team this season, but he isn’t sure that’s the right way to see things.

Back, he says, isn’t the direction to look to find normalcy these days.

“What was normal five years ago isn’t normal now,” Labonte said. “If you have an open mind and look at it, it works. If you look at what you’ve got in the car today and say, ‘That’s pretty normal,’ you go with it. But it’s not normal like it was five years ago.”

Labonte is talking about how much things have changed in the way a Winston Cup car is set up to run these days.

Springs, shock absorbers, sway bars — everything that goes into determining the way a car feels underneath a driver — are arrayed in ways today that would have seemed outlandish a few years ago. Some drivers have been slow to adapt to such major changes and have paid the price competitively.

Labonte struggled through what was, for him, a disappointing season in 2002.

He won the spring race at Martinsville, but had only six other top-10 finishes all year after earning 11 victories and 70 top-10s in the three previous years. He finished 16th in the final points standings, his worst since 1994.

So, Labonte and his Joe Gibbs Racing team decided it needed a new normal.

“We needed to change more than a little bit to get where we needed to be,” Labonte said. “We weren’t looking for little bits.”

After finishing a disappointing 16th in the final 2002 points standings, Bobby Labonte is off to a strong start to the 2003 season. In seven races, he has earned two poles and a race victory.

The changes started late last season when Jimmy Makar, who had been crew chief on the No. 18 team since Gibbs started it back in 1992, agreed to give that job to someone else. With Makar assuming a team manager’s role, Gibbs hired Michael McSwain away from Robert Yates Racing to work with Labonte.

McSwain came in with a fresh look at things, and worked with Labonte and Makar to change almost everything about the car. The team also completed an off-season switch from Pontiacs to Chevrolets.

“(McSwain) wanted something different, and since we had to have all new cars, doing it all just worked out.”

So far this year, things have been working out quite well. Labonte already has earned two poles and his first race victory, a win at Atlanta. He finished fourth at Las Vegas and third at Bristol and is 11th in the points standings after seven races despite misfortune at Daytona, Darlington and Texas that left him 37th or worse in those three races.

“Last year, we were just reaching and grabbing, trying to pull something out of the air to help us out,” Labonte said. “This year, we haven’t tested since Daytona and Las Vegas. We haven’t had to go and try umpteen different things. We haven’t found a lot of weak points to work through just yet.

“Everything is more like we know where we are and working on the areas around the edges. It’s like taking a highlighter to it instead of starting over on a whole new page.”

The best thing, Labonte says, is that he and his team feel confident they can go to the racetrack and contend for a win.