What went wrong, and more to the point, how do we fix it? Technically, that's the question every team in the NASCAR Sprint Cup except for the three-time defending champion Jimmie Johnson team is facing during the sport's longer-than-usual winter's nap.

Johnson's team didn't have a perfect season, but it did win another championship. That's the ultimate goal for every team in 2009. Even those teams that don't have a realistic chance of winning the title are looking to build toward that.

At the end of 2008, it was Carl Edwards and his No. 99 Ford team at Roush Fenway Racing who came closest to unseating Johnson and the No. 48 Chevrolet team from Hendrick Motorsports. But for the first 22 races of last year, Kyle Busch had everyone chasing his No. 18 Toyotas. He won eight of those first 22 races and seemed certain to be a factor in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

Then, it all fell apart.

With no real warning, everything that had gone so right for the young driver started going wrong. A mechanical issue doomed him to 34th in the Chase opener at New Hampshire, and then he lost an engine and finished last the next weekend at Dover. The Chase had barely begun and Busch, by his own admission, was out of the hunt.

"We can't get through a race without having a problem," Busch said later in the Chase after frustration had replaced shock. "I wish we would have seen this in the beginning of the year and had growing pains instead of running so well and having the issues we're having now. If we would have flip-flopped, I would have expected that."

The challenge going forward, of course, is to flip-flop things back to the way they were in the good times of Busch's first season with the

Gibbs team and that three-car operation's first year in the Toyota camp.

Busch had eight wins and 17 top-five finishes in a season that saw Denny Hamlin and Tony Stewart each win once. The Gibbs cars combined for 55 top-10 finishes, but wound up with Hamlin eighth, Stewart ninth and Busch 10th in the final standings.

Hamlin wasn't thrilled with how things were going late last year.

"I think we know what our problems are," he said at Phoenix in November. "It's just real political in the shops. . We know what we want to fix within our race team, there's other departments, there's other heads of departments that have been there a long time that think maybe there's a better way to do it than the way we're doing it. It's tough to say. . As a team we have to get better. I think to do that we're going to have to have everyone within that race shop be a little bit more open-minded."

Busch said he felt his team stalled out in 2008. "Our cars haven't changed much, but we haven't gotten any better," he said. "We've stayed the same and everybody else has just caught up that much."

Joe Gibbs Racing clearly offers Toyota its greatest opportunity for championship success in 2009, but for Busch or Hamlin to win a title he will have to put together a complete season. They'll also have to work without Stewart as the team's senior driver.

He's gone back to Chevrolet as driver-owner of his own team and has turned the No. 20 cars over to young Joey Logano, who is long on promise but will almost certainly battle more for rookie of the year against fellow Toyota driver Scott Speed than he will for the Cup title in '09.

Speed's transition from Formula 1 to stock cars has proceeded with haste. He showed enough promise in his Automobile Racing Club of America and NASCAR Truck Series efforts in 2008 that his ascent to the Cup Series has been expedited, and he joins Brian Vickers in Red Bull Racing's two-car operation for the upcoming year.

Vickers had only six top-10 finishes last year, but half were top fives and both of the Red Bull cars had much more solid, productive second season than they had in the initial year of Toyota's foray into the Cup Series.

The same certainly can be said for Michael Waltrip Racing, too. The worst imaginable start - a cheating scandal at the 2007 Daytona 500 - left many wondering if Waltrip's team would even survive. One of the underrated accomplishments of 2008, then, had to be that after making only 65 combined starts a year earlier Waltrip's cars earned 107 starting spots in 108 tries.

Waltrip returns as driver of the No. 55 Toyotas with David Reutimann changing back to the number - 00 - with which he started 2008. Instead of running a third team this year, Michael Waltrip Racing will house the one-car effort of JTG-Daugherty Racing that has Marcos Ambrose in the No. 47.

Barring last-minute reprieves, which seem unlikely, Toyota will lose the No. 22 team from Bill Davis Racing and Hall of Fame Racing's No. 96 cars. But the manufacturer picks up Robby Gordon, who is coming over from Dodge with his single-car effort.