FORT WORTH, Texas -- Scanning from frequency to frequency over the radio last Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Jimmy Makar began to hear strange things. Over the course of the afternoon, seven or eight drivers reported ignition boxes that they thought were going bad or engines that seemed to be skipping a beat.

"It was a really odd thing to have," said Makar, the general manager at Joe Gibbs Racing. "Now, looking back at it, those people must have been getting some amounts of water in there causing those things to misfire a little bit. But nobody would have thought of it."

Not until later, when the car of Gibbs driver Denny Hamlin sputtered on a restart despite an apparent full fuel cell, and it was revealed that water had contaminated the gasoline that some teams had received. An investigation conducted by NASCAR and official fuel supplier Sunoco pinpointed the cause as a portable fuel dispenser, used at Atlanta to ease the crush around the primary pumps located near the Nextel Cup garage.

"A failure did occur in a piece of portable dispensing equipment that is sometimes used to supplement the permanent pumps on busy race days," NASCAR spokesman Kerry Tharp said Friday at Texas Motor Speedway. "This failure allowed a small amount of water to be dispensed. Portable equipment has been used for many years without problem, and, in fact, this equipment functioned properly during the Craftsman [Truck Series] race at Atlanta right before the Nextel Cup race."

Tharp added that the portable dispenser is not required for fueling at Texas, and that modifications have been made to prevent a repeat of last week's event. That's little consolation to drivers like Hamlin and Dave Blaney, who saw their Atlanta runs ruined by watered-down gasoline.

"We don't have any choice but to be [OK with NASCAR's findings]," said Mike Brown, general manager of the Bill Davis Racing team that fields Blaney's car. "I don't know of any recourse that we could have. It's unfortunate. I guess we were just the first one in line [at the fuel pumps] or something. It's just one of those deals. You can fret about it all day, but at the end of the day I don't think it was anything intentional by anybody. It's unfortunate that we lost some valuable points, but at the same time, I don't know what you can do about it."

Blaney finished 38th, while Hamlin wound up 24th after his Chevy slowed and ignited a three-car accident in the event's penultimate restart. Other teams, including those of Penske Racing and Richard Childress Racing, also reportedly experienced problems. NASCAR revealed Monday that a brown-colored water had made its way into the fuel at Atlanta but that the track's underground storage tanks tested free of contamination, leading investigators to focus on the temporary fuel dispensers.

"I'm glad they at least found the problem," Hamlin said. "That's more important than passing the blame off to somebody else. I think it's good they know what the problem is, and now they can fix it. I'm sure it's probably never going to happen again. They really don't owe us anything. We felt like we ran well, and we were just one of the few guys who had the issues."

It's likely, Makar said, that the teams of Hamlin and Blaney were first in line when fuel was dispensed from those portable pumps, and as a result received gasoline with a higher concentration of water. The water went to the bottom of Hamlin's fuel cell, displacing the gasoline and filling the driver's tank with a liquid that was only combustible to a point.

"Luck of the draw, really," Hamlin said. "It's good to know there was nothing kind of shady there. There was nothing really going on. It kind of got overlooked and it came to the forefront of, we have a problem. As long as they recognize that, we're all good."

Makar said Nextel Cup director John Darby investigated the issues Monday and Tuesday, while the series remained in Atlanta for a Car of Tomorrow test.

"I'm glad they kept digging," Makar said. "I spent a lot of time with John Monday and Tuesday when we were down there testing, and he was really working hard trying to get to the bottom of it. They looked at a lot of different avenues, and he let us know exactly what he was working on. He didn't try to hide anything, didn't try to sugar-coat anything. They did a good job of analyzing it and getting to the bottom of it."

Brown believes NASCAR will learn from the experience.

"I don't feel like that will happen again," he said. "If anything, it made everybody aware what it's like getting a car ready to race. You've got to look at every possibility of what could happen, and contamination is one of those things. It just wasn't our day."

For Martin Truex Jr., who ran into Hamlin after the No. 11 car conked out, the revelation of water in the gas tank seemed a cruel irony. "You weren't allowed to flush your toilet at Atlanta because of the drought," he said, "and he had water in his gas tank."