Kenseth's shot at Cup history goes up in smoke (cont'd)

"We get great power from Doug [Yates] and the guys at Roush-Yates engines, so it's very uncharacteristic for us to have an issue like this," Blickensderfer said. "It didn't even make a lap. It kind of stinks. I think we would have been OK today. Maybe not won the race, but got a lot of points. That's our goal, to get points. It's pretty disheartening. We've got to come back in Atlanta and try to make some up."

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It didn't even make a lap. It kind of stinks. I think we would have been OK today. Maybe not won the race, but got a lot of points. That's our goal, to get points. It's pretty disheartening.

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-- DREW BLICKENSDERFER

They're not alone. Hendrick Motorsports driver Mark Martin suffered an engine failure for the second consecutive week. Front-row starter Kurt Busch spent time on pit road, his crew searching for the source of a misfire. And two of Kenseth's teammates at Roush Fenway Racing, David Ragan and Carl Edwards, coasted into the garage with engine failures. Car owner Jack Roush suspected that all three were broken valves, caused because the team misjudged how much speed Las Vegas would generate under a new Goodyear tire. In turn, the RPMs produced proved too much for the engines.

"We had a choice of which rear axle ratio to use, and we used the higher of the ratios, and it was 200 RPM more than the other ratio would have been," Roush said. "We just made the wrong choice from a crew chief and from an engineering point of view on that. If we can go back looking at it, I'd say I'd need to have more margin in the engine, and it needs to not be that close to its limit. But if you go through the races we won last year and our success at Fontana [last week], there's no reason to be nervous about it. The fact that it crept up a little bit didn't raise the alarm that it should have. We'll be wiser going to Atlanta."

Engine problems have been a recurring theme throughout this young Sprint Cup season. Earlier in the weekend, five Toyota teams were forced to change engines, three of them because of a deterioration of the coating within the cam lifter. Last weekend in Southern California, Hendrick Motorsports teammates Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Martin each suffered blowouts because of valve spring failures. Martin said his problem Sunday was a broken rod, and unrelated to the issue suffered the previous week.

"This one is a bit more puzzling," he said. "The oil pump belt is still on it. I can't understand it. This stuff usually is bulletproof. But I feel bad for [crew chief] Alan [Gustafson] and the whole race team. They're getting it done. They're doing a great job. We're getting better. We were better [Sunday]. I think we were making progress also throughout the race. And we'll get better. But it's a pretty devastating result for us."

But only Kenseth was chasing a historic milestone. He joins Gordon, Marvin Panch, Bob Welborn and David Pearson as drivers who have swept the season's first two events only to come up short in the third.

"Winning the third race, seriously, was the furthest thing from my mind than anything," Kenseth said. "So we approach it one race at a time. I'm very, very thankful for the first two weeks of the season that we had, and for the opportunity to drive this car. So really, you're going to break stuff every once in a while. I think it's the first engine we've broke in two years. The guys at Roush-Yates engines do a good job. It's bound to happen sooner or later. It just didn't happen at a good time."