LOUDON, N.H. -- At this point, calling it a slump seems a little severe. Kyle Busch has won three times in this Sprint Cup season and is again poised to contend for the year-end championship battle, a position most of his competitors in the garage area would take in a heartbeat. But when compared to last year, and the command the younger Busch held over NASCAR for the first two-thirds of the season -- well, his results of late do seem rather mediocre by comparison.

Of course, almost anything would pale when placed up against that 21-victory campaign across NASCAR's three national series. And yet, on the Cup level at least, Rowdy hasn't seemed all that rowdy recently. Only one top-10 since his last victory, at Richmond almost two months ago? No finish better than 13th since late May? A slide to ninth in the point standings? Only 48 points out of potentially missing the Chase? What happened to the dominant Kyle Busch of last season, who won a series-best eight times and seemed to do that little bow of his every other week?

He's in there, as his three victories -- tied for Mark Martin for the series lead -- would attest. But clearly, he's a little more difficult to find these days.

"We just need to get our cars better. We need to get them where I feel like the 14 [car of Tony Stewart] and the 48 [car of Jimmie Johnson] are. They can pass cars. Anytime that I ever need to go somewhere and go forward, I can't ever go forward. I'm always stuck where I'm at," Busch said Friday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

"It's just trying to make our cars better, trying to get them better for the whole run where we can pass cars and come up through the field and make some moves. You look at what Tony did at Pocono -- he went from 43rd and drove up to the front. There might have been some pit strategy up there, but there was a lot of green-flag laps and he drove all the way up to the front. The 48 did the same thing. I think they had a pit-road penalty or got caught on pit road or something like that, and drove right up through the field. It looked like the rest of us were racing mini-stocks and he was in a super late model. It looked stupid. We need to make our cars like that where we make everybody look stupid instead of us being the ones that look stupid."

Steve Addington is working on it. The competitive brain trust at Joe Gibbs Racing recently conducted a review to help the No. 18 team's crew chief pinpoint the source of their relative under-performance. Addington said they tried to build on what they learned last year, but in the process made Busch's cars too loose. Now it's a matter of trying to get closer to that 2008 baseline, and hoping for similar performance. Friday was a good sign -- the No. 18 car was eighth-fastest in opening practice (speeds) for the Lenox Industrial Tools 301, and will start the event ninth after qualifying was rained out and the field set on points. (Continued)