Gibbs team hopes changes avert another Chase crash (cont'd)

J.D. Gibbs said the parts problems the team suffered during last year's Chase were all in-house issues. This year the organization is operating under revised standards as to how far a piece of equipment can be pushed.

"Obviously it's something we haven't had a lot of problems with traditionally, but for whatever reason, we got snake-bit toward the end of the season," Makar said. "And even during the season, there were some oddball things that happened to us. We were pushing parts and pieces a little harder than we ever had in the past technology-wise and in the way we use them or abuse them. I think it made everybody realize that we had to stay aware of where we were when we were on that threshold of pushing parts farther than they needed to be pushed. I think they felt good that we addressed it and had a plan put together to go forward."

Another issue was fuel mileage. Series runner-up Carl Edwards of Roush Fenway Racing was often able to stretch his fuel runs to his advantage, and the Gibbs team simply couldn't keep up. One reason why, Makar surmised, is that Gibbs was in its first season with Toyota, and still probing the limits of what the manufacturer's engine could do. Still, he said engineers tackled the problem in-depth during the winter.

"We've been in positions where we're very good with that stuff, but obviously going with Toyota [last] year, we didn't have the experience that we had with our GM stuff," Makar said. "It's a whole new learning curve, and we found some issues we needed to work on. It's not an excuse, it's new. We had to figure out how to make that better."

There also was some reorganization of personnel, specifically to assemble what Makar calls a "competition group" that aids the race team on location during event weekends. At the request of crew chiefs, some engineers were moved from the shop to the road in order to provide the race programs with dedicated help. The result is better information on which to make decisions. "The race teams felt like they needed a little more direct support for what their needs were, so we organized some stuff inside engineering, took some people out of the shop, and structured that to what we felt was best for us," Makar said.

Although Busch appears to have picked up right where he left off this past September, and Hamlin has shown flashes of title-contender strength, the true impact of the changes the Gibbs team has implemented won't be evident until the organization returns to the Chase. Even so, Busch said, sometimes a 5-cent part breaks no matter how much preparation and research goes into it. There's no defense against bad luck.

"The last 10 races weren't fun at all," Busch said, referring to his 2008 campaign. "The beginning and the middle part of the year, sometimes those wins were just too easy. It was like wow, that wasn't as hard as it should have been. You look at it, and you look at why, and it's because a lot of things fell your way. The luck was there. Then you start running out of luck a little bit, and you're like, we're losing it here. It's going away. And then the Chase started, and it's gone. We had none. There is a certain amount of luck you have to have in this game, and no matter what you do to try to change it, you can't just all of the sudden get it back."

But the Gibbs team is trying to control what it can, attempting to squeeze better reliability out of its parts, better fuel-efficiency out of its engines, and better use out of its people. The lessons of the past fall were humbling ones for an organization that was once the best in NASCAR. No one has forgotten them.

"I think sometimes when you get knocked around at the end of the year, it kind of sets your jaw," Joe Gibbs said. "Nobody here is confident or cocky."