In the world that is NASCAR, no single organization stays on top for very long. History shows that some teams have been able to achieve certain periods of dominance, but eventually technology changes, somebody at some other organization hits upon something no one else has hit on yet, and inevitably there's a change at the top. That great teams will ultimately come back to the field is a fact as unavoidable as the outside wall at Darlington Raceway.

All of which brings us to the most popular question in NASCAR today: What's wrong with Hendrick Motorsports? It's easy to see why people would ask it, given the way Rick Hendrick's organization steamrolled the competition in 2007. The final results were gaudy: 18 total race victories out of 36 points events, including one run of 10 of 12 early in the year. All four of the team's drivers won races, and the organization placed first, second, and fifth in the final championship standings.

And now? No race victories through the season's first five events. Two-time defending champion Jimmie Johnson has looked strangely vulnerable. He and four-time titlist Jeff Gordon are both outside the top 12, while 2007 Coca-Cola 600 champ Casey Mears is struggling to stay inside the top 35 in owner points and keep his guaranteed starting berth. The only driver to look remotely Hendrick-like has been the team's newest hire, Dale Earnhardt Jr., who has top-10s in four of his first five starts and sits a solid fifth in the standings.

Clearly, there's a stark difference in performance from last season to now. So it's easy to see why people are asking the question. And it makes you wonder: what really is wrong with Hendrick Motorsports?

The answer: Nothing.

Hendrick is facing the same thing that Roush Racing faced as it struggled to back up its five-cars-in-the-Chase performance of 2005, the same thing Dale Earnhardt Inc. faced as its epic restrictor-plate dominance began to fade, the same thing every top driver or top team has faced at one time or another: the inherent cyclical nature of the sport. The progression of technology, the changes in equipment and rules and setup tactics, the movement of personnel -- they all combine to make every season a moving target. There's no guarantee that a team is going to hit it one year just because they did before. From a competition standpoint, nothing is more irrelevant in NASCAR than the past.

The surprise isn't that Hendrick has come back to the pack. The real surprise would have been had Hendrick continued its dominance from last year, in defiance of all the statistics that show how difficult that is to do. After all, we've seen something like this before. In 2005, Jack Roush's cars combined to win 15 times. Five of his drivers made the Chase, an astonishing achievement given that only 10 qualified at the time. He did everything but win the championship. The next season? Six wins, two Chase berths, and another reminder of how difficult it is for success to carry over from year to year.

It's even more difficult when a team succeeds to the level of a high-water mark in a hundred-year flood. What Hendrick did last season was the equivalent of a 16-0 regular season in the NFL, or the kind of year Tiger Woods is enjoying right now in golf. Campaigns like that don't happen every year -- or every decade, for that matter -- and it's unrealistic to expect that Hendrick or any other organization can replicate or exceed that kind of success.

The same Hendrick team that won 18 times last year averaged eight wins per season during the first seven years of this decade. Things happened last season that do not happen that often, like Johnson winning races in double-digits (the first time since Gordon did it nine years earlier), Johnson winning back-to-back titles (a first since Gordon's consecutive titles in 1997 and '98) and four Hendrick cars winning races (for just the third time in the organization's 24-year history). It's not as easy as turning on a faucet, even if Hendrick made it look that way in 2007.

Which, of course, is the problem. Hendrick's results of last year have raised the bar of expectation to a completely unrealistic height. Gordon has had top-five cars at Fontana and Atlanta, while Earnhardt has completely lived up to the hype that surrounded his move from DEI. But thus far there are no wins, and people are wondering.

"We certainly are not in a panic," Gordon said. "I feel great about our race team. I hate that we have had two problems [at Daytona and Las Vegas]. I am all about percentages and things like that. Last year we were so consistent, had so few problems, those things weigh themselves out over time. I am kind of happy to get these things out of the way early, because maybe that means we can get our streak where it needs to be, toward the second half of the season, and we can get our speed where it needs to be. We are just this close this first half of the season."

But for now, at least, it seems they're playing catch-up -- to Hendrick expatriate Kyle Busch at Joe Gibbs' shop, to a resurgent Roush Fenway operation, to that three-headed monster at Richard Childress Racing. It's beginning to look like one of those organizations will emerge as the standard-bearer in NASCAR this season. And then they'll discover what Hendrick already knows: that it's the very nature of NASCAR that makes it so difficult for anyone to stay on top.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.