Busch admits an attitude change may help his team (cont'd)

You may hear him aspire to improve his approach, and yes he volunteered his time to Gleaner's Food Bank in Indianapolis this week. But you won't see him lessen his zeal or aggressive driving style on the track.

"We want to be solidly in and running competitively, but ultimately it comes down to competition on the track and that's where my focus is," Busch said. "I'm always focused on trying to make something better."

Busch, sitting 10th in the point standings with three Cup wins but only two top-10 finishes in his last nine starts, knows he needs to keep his emotions in better check and recover from adversity -- turn what may be a poor finish into a top-15.

"Sometimes I wear it on my sleeve too much and I need to shake it off and just figure that it's not going to be me that fixes the car," he said. "All I can do is help give feedback and information and tell them what [the car] is doing."

After a stellar 2008 season, being the driver that everyone was initially chasing, Busch is now experiencing some growing pains.

"I don't like to be chasing," he said. "I like to be the guy leading, so it's hard. But sometimes you have to look back at the big picture and realize that you can do a lot more to help and rally the team than really hurting it and dragging it down."

Turning a bad day on the track into a respectable finish the team can be happy with is something Busch intends to work on.

"When our bad weeks are bad, they're real bad," said Busch, who has slipped in the fight for a Cup championship. "If you're having a bad day then you need to make a 10th out of it and we're not very good at that. I'm not very good at that and I don't think our team is very good at that. Maybe that's because of me. Maybe I'm not leading it in the right direction. I've got some things that I've got to try to work on to make ourselves better and ultimately more championship-caliber."

Rome wasn't built in a day. Don't expect to see a drastic change in Busch overnight, but do expect him to work on things. A step in the right direction might be reading his boss's new book, Game plan for life: Your personal playbook for success.

"I've heard about it," Busch said. "I don't know anything as to what it's about. Apparently it's a game plan of life so maybe that's what I need."