An emotional Daytona 500 win was a nice way to start the season for Kurt Busch, but there’s been a harsh hangover for the No. 41 team ever since.

A seventh-place finish in Atlanta gave way to four consecutive finishes outside the top 20. During the West Coast swing, the team encountered repeated alternator issues (something Busch expressed was a surprise) that negated solid runs.

Now through seven races, Busch sits with just three top-10 finishes, and two laps led. He is 15th in points entering the Food City 500 at Bristol (Sunday, 2 p.m. ET, FOX), a track where he has five career wins. Friday, Busch said Bristol is the start of a stretch of races the team has been looking forward to.

“I’m confident,” Busch said when asked if Bristol could start an upward trend for the 41 team. “We’ve got three top-10s so far this year out of seven races – it’s not bad to finish in the top 10 half the time, but it’s not a championship effort. We know we can do better.”

When it comes to the alternator issues, Busch said that gremlin has been taken care of. It was as simple as his team doing something a little different from his Stewart-Haas Racing teammates.

“Now that we’re to the short tracks aerodynamics go out the window for a few weeks,” Busch said. “Even Talladega, we’ve built one of the best replicas we could build for our Daytona 500-winning car. That’s one of the coolest things and one of the toughest things.

“You win a race, and then you don’t get the car back for a year. It’s like it’s extinct, but yet it’s one of the coolest cars that you’ve ever had. We’ve built a really good car for Talladega, and here we are at the short track, and then we’ll go to Kansas and double-check on the mile-and-a-half stuff we’ve worked on back at the shop here in a few weeks.”

Of the next five races on the schedule (Bristol, Richmond, Talladega, Kansas, Charlotte), Busch has been victorious at three of those tracks. Looking even further, Busch has also scored wins at Dover International Speedway and Pocono Raceway, which the series will visit in early June.

Unfortunately for Busch, his fifth Bristol win came in this race 11 years ago, March 2006. The track has changed since then. Variable banking was laid down in 2007, followed by a grinding of the top groove announced in late 2012.

In recent years, the track has worked hard to restore the bottom groove by applying VHT (Track bite) in the hope that the track will again see side-by-side racing. Although his success came before the track was altered in any way, Busch said he does like the direction being taken. It’s about a driver adjusting to the situation.

It’s something Busch and his team must do if there is hope of getting back to victory lane.

“The way Daytona turned out with the win, everything is so exciting, it’s so big, it’s winning a championship in reverse, and we had a fog around us for a little bit,” Busch said. “It was nice to have an off weekend to reset and to get to the short track portion of the season as well as mix in Talladega coming up in three weeks, where we won the last restrictor plate race earlier this year.

“It’s looking good on this part of the season and everything that’s ahead of us immediately.”