Kyle Busch buoyed, but blames cars

Kyle Busch was NASCAR's hottest driver at this time last year, winning on the road course at Sonoma for his fifth Sprint Cup Series win of the season.

This year has been very streaky, and although Busch is tied with Mark Martin for a series-high three wins, his success seems to come in bunches. He hasn't won since May at Richmond, and he's had just one top-10 finish in the five races since.

But a team meeting last week - sans teammates Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano - has Busch convinced that Joe Gibbs Racing can get back on a roll. Owner Joe Gibbs, president J.D. Gibbs and Busch sat down with the crew chiefs and engineers from the three-team organization.

"We just all sat down and talked about what my feelings were in the car and where I felt like we were struggling at and why I felt we were struggling," Busch said. "We need to get our cars better, that's the biggest thing. Our cars aren't as good as they were last year. Hopefully, the meeting we had will solve some of that and we can continue to get better and learn from some of the mistakes we've made this year."

Busch, who lost the pole for Sunday's race to fellow Toyota driver Brian Vickers, was leading the points at this time last season. He's ninth now, but has 30 bonus points on reserve for seeding at the start of the Chase for the championship.

But he's up just 53 points over the 13th-place driver, and a bad stretch of races could knock him out of Chase contention. There's just 11 races left to determine the 12-driver Chase field.

Busch cited Mark Martin and current points leader Tony Stewart in stressing how fickle the points standings are this season.

"You look at Mark, he was 34th at the beginning of the season about ready to fall out of the top 35 and here is eighth in front of us now," Busch said.

"He's had the success that he's needed in order to bring himself back up through there. Tony has been the same way; he runs top-10 every week. That's the way we were last year.

"The same things would fall our way, and we had luck going our way really well. And this year has just been a struggle to get finishes knocked out every week and go on a string of top 10s."