DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- Maybe the biggest reason Kyle Busch wants to get the 2009 season started is so he won't have to keep answering the same questions.
No, he doesn't consider NASCAR's 2008 Sprint Cup season a failure just because he and his No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota team fell flat on their collective faces in the Chase for the championship.
Yes, he believes he can contend this year.
Even so, the 23-year-old Busch acknowledges he feels some trepidation as he heads toward the season-opening Daytona 500 on Sunday.
"I'm anxious to get going, but not really," Busch said last week. "I would like to get it going and start running well again and start contending and winning races. But I'm not so anxious to get it going because I'm not sure if that's going to happen right away, or what's going to happen."
Last year, his first with JGR and the team's first year racing Toyotas, Busch outshone veteran teammates Tony Stewart -- now driving for his own team -- and Denny Hamlin.
The youngster was the surprise of the season, winning eight of the first 22 Cup events and looking like a surefire championship contender.
It seemed like Busch could do little wrong in any race car or truck as he added 10 wins in the second-tier Nationwide Series and three in NASCAR's truck series -- an amazing total of 21 victories in a single season.
But, with all that success, the enduring recollection of Busch from 2008 will be his disappearing act in the 10-race Chase. He finished what should have been a landmark season with four top-10s and no wins in the last 10 races and wound up 10th in the standings.
The youngster pulls no punches when asked what happened.
"We left the championship out there, that's for sure," he said. "(The) car fell apart in the last 10 races, and you can't have that. ... Overall, it was a good year. We made the Chase, but we wanted to run well in the Chase, contend and be there for the championship, which we weren't able to do at the end of the year.
"That was a bit frustrating, and the Nationwide stuff and the truck stuff, that all kept running real well throughout the year," Busch continued. "I felt like there were some more wins that we could have had in each of those (series), but missed out on. Same with the Cup side. There was a few that we missed out on, but there was some that we didn't deserve, so it all equals out in time, I think."
But Busch also knows the best thing he and his team can do is shake off those memories, correct the problems as best they can and, if they make the 12-man Chase field, handle the pressure better.
Crew chief Steve Addington and the rest of the team spent the winter trying to figure out exactly why things went awry in the last 10 races and how to fix the problems.
"What I think is that we got stale with the package that we had," Addington said. "Guys caught up with us a little bit on the engine package, too. But we spent the winter trying to improve, and I think we have."
Three-time Cup champion Darrell Waltrip, now a TV analyst with Fox Sports, said he expects Busch to bounce back in 2009.
"I had a season exactly like (Busch's) in 1979," Waltrip said. "I won seven races and I won Driver of the Year and I lost the championship (to Richard Petty) in the last third of the season. The last six or seven races, I stopped using my head and started using my foot. The team, we all got in arguments and the car fell apart and I fell apart and we lost the championship.
"What I learned is don't beat yourself. I didn't get beat by the competition. Kyle didn't get beat by the competition, they beat themselves. ... They didn't get outrun that often."
Waltrip noted there's an old saying in racing that you have to lose a championship before you can win one.
"But I've refined that a little bit: You don't have to lose one to win, you have to lose one to learn how to win one," Waltrip noted. "That's the key.
"I'm not throwing stones at anybody, but he had a team with Addington and those guys who had never been there before, never done that. ... And preparation and the nerves of trying to win a championship, sometimes it effects guys that have never done it before."
Busch, starting his fifth full season in Cup, said he is approaching this year a bit different than 2008, with somewhat lower expectations until he and the team prove they can raise their game back to where it was.
"I'm not as optimistic as I was ... The season didn't end on a note that we really wanted it to ... " Busch said. "Losing isn't fun, but you have to learn to deal with it better. You've got to learn that every day isn't your day, but you can make the most of losing sometimes and try to turn it around and win the next week."
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