DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Rick Hendrick could not have had a better year last season, when his powerful organization won 18 races, a second consecutive championship and had three of its four drivers in the Chase.

Despite that success, the car owner is anything but content to rest on his laurels in 2008. The addition of Dale Earnhardt Jr. has created a superstar lineup with tremendous potential to dominate the Sprint Cup Series, and Hendrick has encouraged all four of them to “Accelerate in ’08.”

“Right now we’re tied for last place with 45 other teams,” he said.

“We did have a good year last year, but that’s not going to pay any bills, not going to get us to the Chase or get us to the (championship) stage in New York. We’ve got to work hard and work smart.”

That’s terrifying news to the rest of the garage, which tried last year but failed to dethrone mighty Hendrick Motorsports.

“The 800-pound gorilla in the room is the Hendrick organization that everybody’s fighting,” Kyle Petty, owner and driver for Petty Enterprises.

“Everybody pays attention to them.”

With a lineup that includes two-time defending champion Jimmie Johnson, four-time series champion Jeff Gordon, Casey Mears and Earnhardt, the team was recently compared to the New England Patriots by NASCAR chairman Brian France.

The Patriots fell short of their ultimate goal — losing the Super Bowl on Sunday in an upset to the New York Giants — but NASCAR doesn’t have an obvious challenger with the potential to end Hendrick’s dominance.

That doesn’t mean the teams won’t try.

“We’re not coming into this year to take a butt-whipping,” said Jeff Burton, driver for Richard Childress Racing.

“We’re not here to run second. We’re not here to talk about how good Hendrick is. That’s not why we exist. We exist so people talk about us.”

But deflecting attention from the Hendrick juggernaut will be difficult, especially early.

NASCAR will use its controversial Car of Tomorrow for the entire 36-race schedule this season after phasing it into competition during 2007. Many believe Hendrick dominated last year because its enormous work force and unlimited resources allowed the organization to get a tremendous head start on mastering the CoT.

Even though everyone should be on a level playing field this year, it was clear in preseason testing that the Hendrick crew still has an edge.

Gordon and the No. 24 team seemed to have mastered the car — so much that the vocal driver has softened his criticism of it — and Earnhardt was at the top of the speed charts last month in Daytona.

Gordon expects the addition of NASCAR’s most popular driver to turn the competition within the Hendrick compound up a notch.

He and Johnson already have a nice little rivalry, they went 1-2 in the standings last season, and Earnhardt is expected to join the fray.

“Sometimes you get a little complacent, a little too comfortable,” Gordon said.

“When someone fresh comes in, it’s nice to see some of that excitement.”

There’s also excitement at Toyota, where the addition of Joe Gibbs Racing has already given the automaker a credibility it lacked during its first season at NASCAR’s top level. Camry teams had a disastrous 2007, beginning with Michael Waltrip’s cheating scandal at the Daytona 500 and lasting the entire season as its cars struggled to make races.

Dave Blaney’s third-place finish at Talladega in October was the highest of all Toyota drivers, and Brian Vickers’ fifth-place finish at Charlotte in May was the only other top-five.

But this season starts with four Toyotas already locked into the 500 field, and early speeds indicate that a Camry might even sit on the front row.

It’s given Toyota executives hope that its teams will reach Victory Lane this season, and there’s no reason to believe a Gibbs driver won’t challenge for the title.

Tony Stewart is a two-time series champion, Denny Hamlin made his first Chase last season and newcomer Kyle Busch is determined to show Hendrick how wrong he was for dumping Busch to make room for Earnhardt.

Close attention will be paid this season to the infusion of open-wheel and foreign drivers. Four others have followed Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya’s successful switch to NASCAR, and Sam Hornish Jr. is the only American in the group.

The addition of Scotland’s Dario Franchitti, and French Canadians Jacques Villeneuve and Patrick Carpentier has opened NASCAR to a wider audience at a time when the sport is struggling to grow its existing fan base.

These new open-wheelers can attract international attention and potentially draw in foreign sponsorship that could diffuse the effect of the weak American economy.

But these four open-wheelers may struggle far worse than Montoya ever did.

Considered a rare, exceptional talent with tremendous car control, Montoya’s team owner fully expects him to make the Chase for the championship this season.

The others should be satisfied with simply making all 36 races this season. With 50-some cars expected to fight for 43 spots on most weekends, the NASCAR newcomers might find their transition into stock cars won’t be quite as smooth as Montoya’s was.

It will all play out on the race track, which is where NASCAR wants attention focused after several seasons of tinkering left many longtime fans longing for the good ol’ days. Between the France-designed Chase, two name changes to its title series, and a series of small but altering tweaks, much has changed as NASCAR heads into its 50th running of the Daytona 500.

So France minimized changes this season, hoping to get fans to remember the action, excitement and personalities that make up NASCAR.

“We’re getting back to the basics, we’re going to try to minimize the change going forward as best we can and focus on what we’ve always focused on — which is the best product in the world,” he said.

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