No trophies for Busch to bash lately

Life must be frustrating for Kyle Busch these days. He has plenty of trophies in the Nationwide Series to smash, including Saturday's win at New Hampshire. But it has been nearly two months since his last victory in the Sprint Cup series in Richmond.

Busch has slipped to ninth in the standings as NASCAR heads to New Hampshire Motor Speedway for this Sunday’s Lenox Industrial Tools 301, with a mere 48-point cushion on 13th-place Kasey Kahne.

“No, we’re not used to finishing here and to be honest with you, we haven’t run great since Richmond, but we’ve run decent,’’ Busch said on Friday in Loudon, N.H. “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 top-15 with what you’ve got and then something happens or you have to pit late becuase 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. 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.

“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 [Stewart] 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.’’

New Hampshire might not be the best place for Busch to look for a turnaround. Although he won here in 2006, that was when he was driving the No. 5 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports. He struggled there last year, his first in the No. 18 Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing, finishing 25th in the June race and 34th in the all-important September event that opens the 10-race playoff chase. That was the beginning of the end of Busch’s hopes of capturing the championship in 2008 despite winning eight races along the way.

The team worked in the offseason to produce better flat-track racecars for Busch to drive this season. But Busch believes Gibbs cars have fallen behind Hendrick this season.

Busch is falling behind, too, with four consecutive finishes outside the top 10 in the last four races. He was 23rd at Dover, 22nd at Pocono, 13th at Michigan and 22nd at Sonoma. His last top-10 was at Charlotte in May, when Busch was sixth in the Coca-Cola 600.

“We just need to get our cars better,’’ Busch said when asked what the team was doing to improve results. “We need to get them where I feel like the 14 [Tony Stewart] and the 48 [Jimmie Johnson] is. 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. We might have a good front-run car for the first five laps or whatever. We might have a good long-run car the last 10 laps. But by then it’s too late with the long-run car.

“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 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 th 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.’’