Busch tries to fight way out of midseason mini-slump (cont'd)

"We looked at last year and tried to make it better, and I think we went too far," Addington said. "We've just got to bring it back closer to our baseline. We've got better race cars. We made better race cars over the winter, so I don't feel like we're missing it on our car part of it. We've missed it on our setup packages. It's going back and saying, 'OK, this is where we were good, and this is what we fought here, so let's go back here and it will probably bring us back in line.' I think coming here and unloading and being good helped us with that. [Busch] has been pretty happy with the car since we got here."

But clearly not happy with the results of the past six weeks, a span that has included a 34th-place finish at Darlington, a 23rd-place result at Dover, and 22nd-place finishes at Pocono and Sonoma. This from a driver who a year ago won on three of those tracks, had asserted himself as the clear points leader, and was about to unleash a stretch that would see him win four times in seven weeks.

"We need to be better. We definitely need to be better than where we're at. It's so frustrating to just try to get a finish out of the day, and ultimately you can't even get that. You're just trying to get a top-10 or a top-15 with what you've got, and then something happens or you have to pit late because you're going to run out of fuel, or this or that or whatever, and it takes you back to a 10-something finish or a 30-something finish," Busch said.

"It's just not what this team likes, it's not what this team is used to and it's just very hard to put together a perfect day anymore, for some reason it seems that way. Last year everything fell right. Even thought we had to pit, everybody else had to pit so it sort of cycled out and we finished up front. This year it just seems like it isn't going right. I don't know if it's the honeymoon effect or what. Last year we had it. Seems like Tony has it this year. That first year with a new team, everything just seems to flow easy and works real well. That's just what I've noticed."

Denny Hamlin has noticed his teammate's frustration firsthand. He suffered through some of it himself, until a strong run at Michigan two weeks ago ended a stretch of six weeks outside of the top 10. The Gibbs cars, he said, are steadily improving. But no driver is able to stay on top forever.

"It's peaks and valleys. It's hard to stay on top, and that's what's amazing about what the 48 team has done over the last five or six years. They've stayed on top of that peak. When the 18 had the success that he had last year, I'm not going to say it's a matter of time, but it kind of is," Hamlin said.

"There are times where your cars are good, and times when cars are not good. Right now I don't feel like we have the best cars on the race track, total package. I think our cars are really good, but motor, bodies, things like that, we could be a little bit better. I think there's a little bit of frustration there, but me and Kyle have gotten together and we're having meetings amongst ourselves and talking about what we need to do to get better. If you put Kyle in the best race car, he's going to win more often times than not. We know when Kyle's struggling that it's not just [him] -- it's the cars that we're racing, and we need to work on them and evolve them."

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