Toward the end of a long and sometimes trying season marked by three different crew chiefs and no race wins, Matt Kenseth began to see signs of the stability and consistency he's trying to regain. Now it's a matter of using those small steps forward he made in 2010, and translating them into a return to Victory Lane next year.

"Right now, to be totally honest with you, my 100 percent goal right now is to win a race," said Kenseth, who this past season finished fifth in final points, his best result in three years. "We need to win a race and go from there."

Kenseth didn't have many opportunities to do that for much of 2010, when he led laps in only six of the year's first 28 races. A very hands-on driver who is given the freedom by car owner Jack Roush to make some of the personnel decisions on his race team, Kenseth spent most of the season trying to make pieces fit together. That process was sometimes difficult, as evidenced in the second week of the season, when he made the first of what would become two crew chief changes on the No. 17 team.

Kenseth began the year working with Drew Blickensderfer, the crew chief with whom he had swept the first two races of the 2009 campaign. But a year later, Kenseth was looking for a spark he didn't see. "It takes a lot of work and enthusiasm and attitude and all those things to be successful, and I wasn't feeling that vibe," he said in Fontana, Calif., after making the change. Onto the pit box stepped Todd Parrott, who had once enjoyed success as Dale Jarrett's top wrench-turner, and had been working in the research and development department at Roush.

But Kenseth's struggles were only one part of larger troubles within the Roush camp, which eventually discovered it had been using flawed simulation software that put its teams behind when they reached the track. After a promising start with Parrott, Kenseth began finishing in the middle of the pack with regularity, and in the summer another change was made. In came Jimmy Fennig, a Roush veteran who had long been Mark Martin's crew chief, and had won the 2004 championship with Kurt Busch.

"It does seem like I'm pretty hard on crew chiefs lately, that's for sure," Kenseth said in late June after the move was made. "But we've just had some opportunities within the organization ... and we just had some opportunities to mix things up a little bit and see if we can get the team heading in the direction we think it needs to be headed in."

It took a little while, but at long last, something finally began to click. Maybe it was Roush fixing the issue with its simulation software, maybe it was Fennig's touch, maybe a combination of both. By the end the year, Kenseth was beginning to look like the old Matt Kenseth again, one of the steadiest drivers of his age. The No. 17 car had chances to win two of the final three races, it began to lead laps with more consistency, and Kenseth placed inside the top 10 in five of his final eight starts.

"The biggest thing is, I feel like our cars were faster," Kenseth said. "All the time when we got to the track, all our cars were faster. We seemed to have been able to -- not in the last race, we got behind in our last adjustment -- but we seemed to have been able to adjust the cars better and be better at the end of the race. Where most of the year, if we didn't start off really good, and the track didn't stay the same, we'd have a hard time making the right adjustments. So that part seemed to get a little bit better toward the end of the year."

For Kenseth, who missed the Chase last year and missed the 10-man cutoff to appear at the banquet before that, the top-five points result was a breakthrough. Now it's just a matter of getting race wins to go along with it.

"I wish we would have had some wins along the way, but we did finish off the year strong, with some strong finishes, and moved up to fifth in points," Kenseth said. "The Chase was not near perfect -- I messed up at Dover on pit road, and sped on pit road at Talladega, had an engine break at California. We had so many problems, but just to come back and finish fifth in points was a pretty good accomplishment for us."

Video: Kenseth's awards ceremony speech