Kyle Busch needs to get his act back together, after a ragged several weeks

  
What's suddenly wrong with Kyle Busch? (Photo: Toyota Motorsports)

  

   By Mike Mulhern
   mikemulhern.net

   SONOMA, Calif.
   Kyle Busch may have hit the wall. It's been either all or nothing this year.
   Since his win at Richmond, he's logged only one top-10, a sixth in the rain-shortened 600, sandwiched between runs of 34th, 23rd, 22nd and 13th.
   Busch won here last summer, so Sunday's 350 could show more about just what may be going on here.
   Teammate Denny Hamlin has gotten hot lately, but his run of bad luck hasn't ended. And rookie teammate Joey Logano is also making big steps in improvement.
   But there is the sense that the Joe Gibbs operation may be stumbling, for some reason.
   So Gibbs held a big team meeting a few days ago, with son J. D. Gibbs, the operation's crew chiefs and head engineers, and Busch himself.
  "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 says. 
    "We had a good test at Indy; I felt that went well.  We learned some things for ourselves, as well as helping Goodyear, that maybe we can take back there.
   "You can look at the points (Busch has slipped to ninth)…but the only way to bring yourselves up in the points is to run better. 
   "You look at Mark Martin; he was 34th at the beginning of the season, about ready to fall out of the top-35, and here he is eighth, in front of us now. 
    "He's had the success he's needed in order to bring himself back up through there. And Tony Stewart has been the same way; he runs top-10s 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. 
    "We need to get our cars better, that's the biggest thing. Our cars aren't as good as they were last year. 
    "I feel we've been struggling in some areas.
    "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."