Justin Haley impressing in first season with Rick Ware Racing

Justin Haley may only be 30th in the NASCAR Cup Series points standings, but he's turning heads on a weekly basis. 

The 25-year-old driver collected a 13th-place finish at Iowa Speedway last Sunday, and he will look to put forth another solid effort when the Cup Series visits the New Hampshire Motor Speedway on Sunday. 

Thirteenth may not be a banner day for the likes of Hendrick Motorsports or Joe Gibbs Racing, but for a Rick Ware team that has struggled to consistently break the top 30 during their Cup Series tenure, it marks vast improvement. 

Iowa wasn't the only time Haley has impressed this season, however. At Bristol on March 17, he ran inside the top 10 for much of the day before tire management became the name of the game late. While veterans such as Denny Hamlin surged, the younger crop of drivers faded, leaving Haley to finish 17th. 

One week later at Circuit of the Americas, Haley and the No. 51 team once again had a solid run and initially thought it had another 17th-place finish. Unfortunately, a disqualification relegated the team to a 39th-place finish, forcing Haley to lose 22 valuable points that would bump him up to 26th in points. 

While the No. 51 team cooled off in April, the real signs of progress started to be shown at Kansas on May 5. While Haley finished a pedestrian 18th, the team parlayed one solid effort into their best finish of the year at Darlington, where Haley both ran and finished inside the top 10, grabbing a ninth-place effort at arguably the toughest track on the NASCAR circuit. 

While a 22nd-place finish in a rain-shortened Coca-Cola 600 brought Haley briefly back down to earth, another ninth-place effort followed at Gateway. While Sonoma bore little fruit, Iowa was a return to form for a No. 51 team that is consistently performing way above their paygrade. 

Upgrading both driver and equipment — Rick Ware Racing now has an alliance with Roush-Fenway-Keselowski Racing — certainly has helped, but the team as a whole deserves credit. For much of their short tenure in NASCAR, they'd been the butt of jokes, only mentioned on broadcasts when one of their cars was spinning or in the wall. 

Now, Haley has turned the No. 51 team into a legitimate dark-horse contender. While it's unlikely that Haley grabs a miraculous win and makes the Cup Series playoffs, RWR could become a borderline playoff threat if Haley stays in the coming years and helps develop a team once thought to be condemned to the back of the pack.