LAS VEGAS -- Only three laps had passed before the foreboding words came over the radio. "I think it's going to blow," Matt Kenseth said. And soon afterward, it did.

That was how Kenseth's bid for a historic sweep of the year's first three Cup Series races ended, with a plume of white smoke emanating from the rear of his blue and red No. 17 car. He limped off the track at Las Vegas Motor Speedway after just six laps, his season-opening roll brought to an abrupt, premature end by the latest in a spate of engine issues to plague the NASCAR garage area (watch video).

"I don't know that I've ever dropped out on Lap 1 before," Kenseth said as crewmen examined the damage under the hood. "It's never really easy. We didn't even really get to race today, and we qualified bad, so it was a pretty long weekend for nothing. It's disappointing no matter what. I'm glad we did great the last two weeks, but really, you take it one week at a time and shift your focus to that race each and every week. It's always disappointing when something like that happens."

Kenseth, who went winless all of last season, won the Daytona 500 and last week's race at Auto Club Speedway, in the process becoming the first driver to sweep the year's first two events since Jeff Gordon did it in 1997. No driver had ever won the first three events, and Kenseth's bid seemed doomed from the start -- his car struggled in practice, was faster than only six of the 51 vehicles that attempted to make the Shelby 427 in qualifying, and started sounding strange on the very first lap of Sunday's event.

On Lap 3, Kenseth pitted so his team could check spark plug wires, which looked fine. Crew chief Drew Blickensderfer radioed to Kenseth that the crew was discussing disconnecting a bad cylinder. They didn't need to bother. "You can start packing it up," Kenseth said. "I'm going to be there in about two laps."

And he was. It was the first engine failure suffered by the No. 17 team in two years.

"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."