As recently as five races ago, Rusty Wallace was 18th in the NASCAR Winston Cup points standings.

He was coming off a race in which he was taken out -- by his own teammate, no less -- on the third lap. It was his third finish outside the top 20 and had him pretty revved up about his sputtering season.

"It's pretty damn ridiculous," he said.

Them sound like quittin' words to you? They better not. Rusty Wallace is not a quitter. In fact, amid reports last season that he was thinking about retirement, the 46-year-old driver went out a posted 17 top-10 finishes and ranked seventh in the final standings.

Then he made it clear he was coming back for another year and would certainly be finishing out his contract -- if not trying to extend it.

So when he left Talladega Superspeedway five races ago with a 37th-place finish -- his hopes for a strong start to the year bruised and not quite wanting to think about when he would finally snap a winless streak that's approaching 80 races and whether he could actually win his second Winston Cup championship this year -- Wallace reflected on his words.

Pretty damn ridiculous, indeed. The thing that he thought was ridiculous was that the team was going to the track, coming home lower than it felt it should've, loading up another car and going to the next track. He decided then that it was time to take a long, hard look at what was going wrong from week-to-week and fixing it before moving on to another race.

Since then, Wallace has swiftly made his way to eighth in the points standings and is coming off a sixth-place effort at Dover.

"It's frustrating," Wallace said of the slow start and the fact that he still has not won a race since in his last 76 tries. "I summed it up a few weeks ago by saying it's getting damned ridiculous. It is, because we're a hell of a quality team, and there's people popping up like popcorn winning races with no consistency, and that gets upsetting.

"My teammate Ryan Newman is supposed to be winning races with the equipment we've got, the engineers he's got and he's a naturally talented guy, so I expect it out of Ryan. But there are other drivers that are popping up and I didn't think they'd win, but they are. That's racing. I feel like our team is a team that's expected to win every single week, and when we're not, we've got to start looking in the mirror and wonder 'what the hell is going on here?'"

The team appears ready to do just that.

	Wallace has five top-10 finishes in 2003.

Case in point: Two weekends ago at Lowe's Motor Speedway near Charlotte the team was turning some pretty poor pit stops. Sure, the reason that he fell a lap down in that race was that he pitted under a green flag and the yellow flag came out while he was still in the pits. But the fact that the team was slow and error-prone that evening certainly didn't help.

Wallace and crew chief Bill Wilburn talked about the problems and committed to making sure they were fixed before the team left for Dover.

"(Wilburn) worked real hard on that pit crew last weekend and the pit stops I had were second to none," Wallace said. "They were fabulous. I had some 12.90s. I never had pit stops that fast in my life, and boy did it feel good to come out of there with that consistency. That's what it's going to take to get it back in victory lane, a good handling car and things like that."

Notice that Wallace said victory lane -- not the top 10. He's happy with where he is in the standings and where he finished last weekend, but that doesn't mean he won't work harder. That doesn't mean the entire No. 2 Dodge team won't push harder.

"Obviously we want to win races," he said. "That's my main goal right now to do that, but we've been rock solid, there's no doubt about that. We've just got to get a little smarter on our chassis.

"I don't want to be sitting out of the top 10, that's for sure. That's something that's always a concern going into the year. If something goes disarray with all the big-time competition going on, but we've been pretty steady."

Steadier than most, in fact. While some veterans who have enjoyed championships or several consecutive years finishing in the top 10 have had down seasons which included falling out of the top 10, Wallace hasn't finished outside the top 10 since 1992. And that 1992 campaign, in which he finished 13th, is his only sub-top 10 since 1986.

Much of that can be attributed to the steady hand Wallace has offered his team behind the wheel of his cars -- whether they be Pontiacs, Fords or, now, Intrepids.

"In the last decade, I don't know that I've changed a lot of my driving style, and if I have, I don't realize it," he said. "The car and equipment and the races and personalities and engineering and all this stuff has come on to alter what might look like a change in driving style. In my heart, I don't think I'm driving any different.

"I'm definitely not as sporadic and wide open as I was before. I think I'm more focused and on the gas now and paying a lot of attention."

What has changed is the competition and the money, Wallace said, which can help explain why he's spent the last four seasons trying to crack the top five in the final standings.

	"	I feel like our team is a team that's expected to win every single week, and when we're not, we've got to start looking in the mirror and wonder 'what the hell is going on here?' "
		— Rusty Wallace

"(There used to be) 10 guys that could win at any given time and now you've got 25 of them cats," he said. "It's definitely changing."

Another reason that Wallace has had a victory lane drought could be attributed to how much he still likes to tinker with the race car, although he doesn't agree with that. As the money being pumped into the sport has increased, the technology has progressed. Add to that the fact that the engineers are smarter and you get computers that can tell teams exactly how a car should be set up.

Some in the garage believe that, while the young guns and some open-minded veterans have taken the computers' advice, Wallace and some others have not.

But Wallace says the problems aren't in the amount of work that's being put in. He believes his input can only help. He says that the problems can be attributed to chemistry and luck.

"What's the reason we're struggling on this?" he asked. "Again, it's a people sport. I think organization has a lot to do with it. I think catching all the breaks on the pit stops has got a lot to do with it, and I think having a great handling car has got a lot to do with it.

"I've personally been real happy with the performance of our car. I thought this year we've run really, really well. We've qualified great. We've been in the top 10 a lot and the races we haven't been in the top 10 it's only because something weird has happened like pitting while running third and the caution flag comes out and puts you two laps down like what happened at Bristol, Texas and Darlington.

"... Those type of things are real upsetting to deal with, but the performance of that car I think has been there all year long."

Whatever the reasons, Wallace and Co. are working on them. After all, if he wasn't putting forth every bit of energy he had, it'd be like quitting to him.

"We're not going to quit," he said. "That's not my personality and that's not this team's personality. We're working at it and it's showing. We'll go to Pocono and see what we got."

Rupen Fofaria covers NASCAR for The Raleigh News & Observer and is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached at rups@theraces.com.