He won four races this past Sprint Cup Series season; only two drivers won more, and two others won as many. But 2009 was a disappointment for Kyle Busch, who didn't have much success outside of those victories and missed the Chase for the first time since his first full season in 2005.

Busch finished the season with nine top-fives and 13 top-10s, a huge falloff from the previous year when he posted career-highs with eight victories, 17 top-fives and 21 top-10s in his first season in the No. 18 Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing.

Busch finished the season with nine top-fives and 13 top-10s, a huge falloff from the previous year.

Most glaring, there were just as many misses as hits for Busch, who finished outside the top 20 in 12 races including 10 through the defining first 26 of the season. Consecutive finishes of 33rd at Chicago (engine) and 38th at Indianapolis -- a blown tire forced him into the wall and cost him 46 laps for repairs -- dropped Busch out of the top 12 to stay.

Despite winning three of the first 10 races, Busch followed each of those victories with a rather pedestrian effort the next time out. He finished 24th at Martinsville the week after winning at Bristol, and didn't fare better than 17th until he won again at Richmond five races later. But that was followed with a 34th at Darlington and he posted but two top-10s in the subsequent nine races through Indy.

Busch scored three top-fives in the five races leading up to the Chase, including a sweep at Bristol and a fifth at Richmond, but it wasn't enough. He fell eight points shy of making the Chase.

A season of promise unfulfilled ultimately cost Steve Addington his job as crew chief, with Dave Rogers taking over for the final three races in preparation for 2010. In their first race together, at Texas, Busch led 232 laps but ran out of fuel three laps from the end, resulting in an 11th-place finish. The pair followed with a 12th-place finish at Phoenix and scored its first top-10 with an eighth at Homestead.

After competing in a grand total of 86 races across all three of NASCAR's national series in 2009, many wondered if Busch was spreading himself too thin. All indications are his schedule in 2010 won't be as intense. But don't expect Busch to let up.

Didn't get much better than this

After crashing out and finishing a season-worst 41st in the Daytona 500, Busch responded with a third-place run the following week and victories in two of the next three races, capped by a dominating performance at Bristol where he led 378 of 503 laps. He jumped from 38th to a season-best fourth in points.

The disappointment still lingers

Perhaps no race told the tale of Kyle Busch in 2009 than the summer extravaganza at Daytona. Busch had the lead coming down the final stretch when he tried to block a charging Tony Stewart and got turned into the wall. His wrecked car was credited with a 14th-place finish. Chicago and Indy followed, and Busch's season officially was unraveling.