Many swings and misses at confounding Chicagoland (cont'd)

The result was a loose race car that only got looser, to the point where Busch said over the radio that he felt like he was competing in a Nationwide Series car. "I told Steve that we need to put this car on the chassis dyno and back in the wind tunnel to figure out what went wrong," Kurt said after finishing two laps down in 25th. "It's just strange. We got bad-loose, and everything that we threw at it didn't make it better. We threw wholesale changes at it including front shocks midway through the race, and that's about as good as our car was all night."

Addington had a simple explanation. "We just missed it," he said. "We tried, and we didn't want to kill the car. We came in and changed shocks in the middle of the race, and we made gains on it, but we still got loose. It's surprising. It caught a lot of people off guard. ... This place and Kansas are two of the most off-the-wall places that we have, but we have to race Kansas in the Chase, so we have to figure something out."

He's not alone. Earnhardt ran deep in the field all night and finished 23rd, a result that knocked him to 13th in the standings and out of Chase position. "We had just a really sh---y, sh---y-driving car all night. We made it worse at times and made it better at times. We just weren't very good. There aren't any excuses, we just weren't very good," he said.

"I just let [crew chief] Lance [McGrew] rip away, man. I let him swing away trying to get the car as good as we can get it. I believe what he does is right. [Saturday night] some adjustments didn't respond like we thought they should of, but, sometimes this car doesn't behave like you think it would. Some things you do to it don't really turn around and do what you think. Oh, well. We are pretty disappointed, a little bit devastated about how we ran [Saturday night]. We got nobody to blame but ourselves. We worked really hard in practice trying to get better because this was about how we were going to run. We just couldn't make it better all night."

It was a common refrain, one of cars unloading either tight or loose and staying that way for the whole weekend. Harvick was ultimately doomed to a 34th-place finish by a busted fuel pump that necessitated a long stint in the garage for repairs, but even before that his No. 29 car struggled to get a handle on the track. According to Miller, it was a perfect storm -- a fast race track that's losing grip as it ages, a schedule that called for practice in the daytime and racing at night, and a very small window in which to figure out how to make the car go fast.

"This place has lost some grip over the years, and these fast places where some grip's coming out of the track, there's not just a real big opportunity to get it right," Miller said. "When you're right, it shows. And when you're off just a little bit, it's really hard for the guys to do it out there. The reason I think you saw so many normal front-running cars struggle is just, the grip is coming out of the race track, and the window of opportunity to hit the setup is just really small when it's like that."

And sometimes, the final call was little more than a guess. "We're all creatures of habit, and then you throw this schedule in that was really different, and I think it threw everyone for a loop a little bit," Rogers said. "You practiced in the middle of the day, you raced a lot in the night, so you're guessing."

All of which led to plenty of ranting and raving over the radio from drivers not accustomed to such mediocre performance. "You have no idea how hard this is," Kyle Busch radioed to his crew early in the event, as the No. 18 chugged along in 29th position. Busch couldn't be located for comment afterward, but the crew chief said there were no fireworks in the extended post-race debrief.

"He kept his composure," Rogers said. "We had a really long meeting after the race, and he had nothing but constructive comments. Not throwing things, not upset, not frustrated. He sat down and said, 'Hey, this is what it did in practice, this is what it did in the race, this is what I think we need to go faster, this is what I think these adjustments did.' It was very helpful. I think Kyle did a tremendous job of being a driver/leader. Ultimately, our goal is to win the championship, and I think Kyle knows he's going to have to step up every now and then and carry the race team. He did a great job with it [Saturday night]. I'm disappointed with the team letting him down. I feel like I let him down [Saturday night]."

Rogers' solace? Saturday night at Chicagoland, he was far from the only crew chief who felt that way.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.