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.

"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."

• Sound Off: Busch | Hamlin