JOLIET, Ill. -- Forty-five minutes after the end of Saturday night's race at Chicagoland Speedway, the only cars still in the garage stall were the top five finishers, undergoing teardown inspection under the eyes of Sprint Cup officials. All the others were loaded up on the big team transporters -- some of which were beginning to rumble to life, back out of their narrow parking spaces, and begin the long haul back to North Carolina.

That's when Dave Rogers emerged from the No. 18 truck, his firesuit long since replaced by street clothes, after an extended meeting with driver Kyle Busch. The subject: why one of NASCAR's best teams suffered through a trying night that saw Busch mired back in the pack for almost the entire event.

“

We got bad-loose, and everything that we threw at it didn't make it better.

”

-- KURT BUSCH

"It was a really productive meeting," Rogers said after a 17th-place result that wasn't as good as it looked. "I'm really proud of Kyle, because this was a great night for him to get frustrated and put it in the fence. With the sponsors we have with M&M's and Snickers, and the resources we have, and with Toyota supporting us, we don't really have any excuses to run back there. I think we have the best driver in the business. Everyone has those days, but I don't think we have any legitimate excuses for those days."

Throughout the garage, it wasn't difficult to find similar lamentations from crew chiefs on championship-contending teams that were wondering what the heck exactly happened Saturday night. From points leader Kevin Harvick, to Kyle and Kurt Busch, to Chase bubble driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., Chicagoland was an abject struggle, with a number of usually solid cars whiffing on setups and spending all evening slogging it out deep in the field. The biggest gambles this weekend in the Joliet area weren't at the riverboat casinos lining the Des Plaines River, but at the 1.5-mile speedway where crew chiefs were left to make guesses on the best way to prepare their cars.

"Anytime we do this, practice in the heat of the day and then race at night, you always keep your fingers crossed that the track conditions are going to come to the way you've tuned your car, and it's a guess. It's a little bit of a guess," said Scott Miller, a former crew chief and current competition director at Richard Childress Racing, which fields Harvick's car. "All these race teams keep really good notes, and we've done this before, but it seems like each time it will take a little bit different turn on you. Even looking back at past history, there are enough things that are different that not even historical notes always pay dividends."

Steve Addington can relate. The crew chief on the No. 2 team worked from his notes from his 2008 victory at Chicagoland with Kyle Busch, and said he spent four hours Friday night going over setup tactics with current driver Kurt Busch. They talked about making big changes, became a little wary of doing so, and fell back on their regular package for 1.5-mile tracks -- not necessarily a reach, given that they've won twice on such intermediate venues so far this year.

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.