Trying to come up with a ride for the 2010 Cup season, Dave Blaney believes his prospects look better than what he settled for in 2009.

What he settled for couldn’t have been much worse. Left without a team when Bill Davis folded up shop about this time last year, and being a 47-year-old veteran driver without enough past success to attract attention from existing teams, Blaney took what he could get just to stay in the game.

Well, he sort of stayed in the game. He signed on with a new team formed by Phil Parsons, knowing that Parsons didn’t have sponsorship but would try to make it as what is derisively known as a “start and park” team: one that would qualify and then run just a few laps to take advantage of spots available because of the lack of enough fully funded teams to fill all 43 spots in every race.

Parsons, who first used the strategy in the Nationwide Series in 2008, had plenty of company. New teams owned by Joe Nemechek and Tommy Baldwin and old ones owned by Bob Jenkins and James Finch also did it at times.

“Everybody that is in the middle of that wanted to start building something,” Blaney said. “In my case, we didn’t do that. It was hard.”

But for Blaney, that was better than the alternative.

“In my case, the other option was stay at home,” he said. “I didn’t think that was a better option for me. Even if it was a start and park, at least I was in the car and kind of staying current with them, and I was there at the track and available if something happened to somebody and a team needed a driver.”

But that didn’t make it any easier to just drive a few laps each week when he really wanted to compete.

“The first month of the season was really tough to deal with,” Blaney said. “But for me and everyone else on the team it was the same way... Once we got going with it, qualifying did provide a challenge just trying to make the races. But after that, the rest of the weekend was a letdown.”

What made it worse was that at the beginning of the season, Blaney thought he would get to go the distance in six to eight races as part of a technical relationship that Parsons had with Michael Waltrip Racing.

“They had an agreement with Waltrip’s team to be a test team at some races if there were some things they wanted to try,” Blaney said. “We did that at Charlotte for the 600 and then they pulled the plug on that. When that went away, it was frustrating.

Blaney finished 28th in the 600. After that, the times he really got to race came in a couple of starts in the Nationwide Series – one for Parsons and one for Braun Racing.

Most weeks, he was one of the first three cars to drop out. Outside of the 600, he never finished better than 37th. He ended with 30 starts and failed to qualify four times in his 34 attempts. Three of the times he came up short on qualifying came in the last six races.

“We were stuck with some equipment that we knew wasn’t going to be up to it and it caught up to us,” Blaney said. “We ran the same stuff all year. I don’t want to say it was worn out, but we were overmatched at the end to make the races.”

Blaney said he would have taken a competitive Nationwide or Truck ride, and that he is close to a 6-8 race deal with a good Nationwide team for 2010, but those opportunities are more scarce than in Cup.

“In the Nationwide and Truck Series, the rides are usually going to guys who can bring sponsorship,” Blaney said. “I still want to be involved. My ego is not huge enough to say if I don’t have a great ride I’m not coming, I still want to race here. I’m old enough to know I’m not going to get great opportunities. But if I get the right opportunity I can still race well if it gets put together right.”

He is considering a possible return to his roots in the World of Outlaw sprint car series, but doesn’t see doing that regularly because of the time needed for the Outlaws’ 50-plus race schedule while his 15-year-old son Ryan still has an interest in racing. Blaney fielded a car for Ryan in the PASS South late model series last season.

Blaney, who started racing sprints in 1981 and has a sprint car, said he will do more of that kind of racing this summer – not on the World of Outlaws series – but at the dirt track he owns at Hartford, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania state line and other tracks in that area.

“If Ryan wasn’t racing a lot, I would be more apt to try the Outlaws,” Blaney said. “But, the sprint cars take way more time away from home than Cup does, and I want to help Ryan. I am planning to run more dirt sprint car races this summer if I can fit it in, just to get a feel of where I may go with that down the road.

“My choice would be to go back to sprint cars. ... But, a big part of it now is trying to help Ryan get going and see what he wants to do. He’s only 15. Right now he loves it, but in two years he may not. Right now, it’s going really well. And I want to get Ryan in the sprint cars to have that experience of driving a light car with a lot of power.”

Now, he’s trying to come up with something to make it better for himself next season. Blaney said he is talking to small teams that competed last year and are indicating that they will have the funding to go the distance in most if not all the races next season.

“A lot of smaller teams are still figuring out what they are going to do, trying to round up money,” Blaney said. “But there are also some pretty good drivers around. We’ll try to get in the best situation where we can race a lot and get with a team that is the most competitive. There’s nothing guaranteed.”