The swagger had vanished, and the cocky confidence went with it. A two-week slump sent Kyle Busch spiraling into crankiness despite his hold atop the points standings. With a win Sunday at Infineon Raceway, his mood instantly lifted.

Busch snapped his mini-slump by racing to his first Sprint Cup Series win on a road course with a Toyota that was so bad during practice he was certain he’d wreck.

Instead, he made his series-high fifth visit to Victory Lane this season.

No matter how bad the race is, and this one was the snoozer of the season, Kyle Busch and his team find a way to win. Busch easily won the Best Buy 400 on Sunday, his fourth Sprint Cup victory of the year, without making a single on-track pass for the lead. Quick work in the pits under green-flag stops put Busch out front in the No. 18 Toyota with 163 laps to go. Except for a brief reshuffling for the last green-flag stops, that’s where he stayed.

The crowd booed him. He called his car pathetic. His crew missed a lug nut, and he couldn’t stay off Darlington Raceway’s wall. Despite it all, Kyle Busch found Victory Lane once again. NASCAR’s least popular driver raced to his third Sprint Cup Series victory of the season Saturday night, winning a battle of attrition at the track “Too Tough to Tame.”Busch’s victory hardly thrilled the crowd, which viciously booed him in prerace introductions and hadn’t softened by the time he took the checkered flag. Already loathed by many, he enraged Dale Earnhardt Jr’s massive fan base by wrecking him as they raced for the win last week in Richmond.

Toyota general manager Lee White stood just inside the iron fence that surrounds Victory Lane at Atlanta Motor Speedway on Sunday and watched Kyle Busch celebrate the first Sprint Cup win for the foreign manufacturer.

Somewhat overshadowing Busch’s first win with Joe Gibbs Racing were the overwhelming complaints about the hard tires Goodyear brought to the new car’s first trip to the 1.54-mile speedway.

Second-place Tony Stewart, Busch’s teammate, went so far as to say Goodyear should pull out of the sport and let Hoosier or Firestone build tires if Goodyear can’t do better.

Third-place Dale Earnhardt Jr. was so frustrated he was thinking of attending a Goodyear tire test on Monday at Darlington, even though he’s not one of the drivers scheduled to attend.