Vickers disqualified after car deemed to be too low (cont'd)

The entire outcome left Richert baffled.

"The sad thing is, we went through inspection, and I don't have a relationship or a marriage to any of those parts underneath there," he said. "I don't know what they're going to do, or when they're going to do it."

Something did something, however.

"That's what we're trying to do right now, look at it and say, 'Did something go wrong -- did the spring collapse?'" Richert said. "We were within an eighth-of-an-inch of making it, with the tolerances they've built into the sticks.

"The bad thing is being low doesn't really mean anything when you run bump stops [in the suspension]. It's not like you're gaining anything -- it's still stopping at the same spot even if you're starting it an inch off the ground."

Richert said his team isn't giving up, but the setback was a blow.

"We have no mulligans," Richert said. "We either have to get in on time or we go home, with the position that we're in. And we can't get points if we keep going home.

"I'd much rather swallow it if I'd run the whole race, adjusted on the car and turned the jack screws. I could swallow that better if I did it wrong, but how do I control something I didn't do?"

In a penalty-laden climate of the COT, Richert said that was his least worry.

"It's a bad enough penalty that we're going home," he said, "Because it just buries our race team in the ground, not getting points when the whole world revolves around points."

Richert said he'd looked to try to determine if something in the spring's mount had failed, saying "I haven't found any signs of the spring giving up, yet."

The event was a joyous turnabout for Chaffin, who was victimized at Pocono last season when he qualified one of Front Row Motorsports' cars only to have its time disallowed for a similar violation.

"I know how they feel, from having that happen to me at Pocono last year," Chaffin said. "But now I get to reap the benefit of that rule, so turnabout's fair play. We're just tickled to death to be here."

Now, he has a chance for 300 miles of making better acquaintances of his new teammates.

"This is my first time in a COT car," Chaffin said. "Quite frankly, if we were to start the day over again, we'd make some wholesale changes, but we brought what we had, we did good things with it, and I think we've got good things coming."

But for Richert and Vickers, it's the latest bitter disappointment in a season that's seen the team score Toyota's first top-10 and top-five finishes in Nextel Cup.

However, the team came into the weekend 40th in the critical owner points, and is only 67 points ahead of 41st-place David Reutimann, which made the race.

"We go through [pre-qualifying] inspection and the car was presented, it was correct," Richert said. "We never raised the hood, we didn't turn a [jack] screw but now we go back through [post-qualifying inspection] and we're thrown out, and we've got to send our team home. And I don't really have a good answer why."