More than anything else, those two items — the first a heim joint that busted at New Hampshire, the second a master control switch that fell off at Martinsville — have come to define JGR’s recent history in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, which for one of the sport’s elite organizations has too often become a frustrating effort in crisis management. Each fall the team’s success on the race track gives way to questions about quality control, with memories of Busch’s star-crossed 2008 campaign — where he won eight races only to have three consecutive weeks of mechanical issues sideline him in the Chase — still fresh in the mind.

The fate last year of Hamlin, in the thick of the title hunt until his master control switch shook loose in the 33rd of 36 points events, only serves to reinforce it all. But this year JGR enters the Chase as strong as it’s been since Stewart’s glory days with the organization, with Matt Kenseth and Busch occupying the first and third seeds, respectively, as the playoff opens Sunday at 1.5-mile Chicagoland Speedway — just the kind of intermediate track on which Gibbs has enjoyed so much success already this season.

It all shapes up as a golden opportunity for JGR to rewrite its recent history in the Chase, which hasn’t produced a championship for the organization since Stewart’s last title there in 2005. That is, if one of those nagging failures doesn’t get in the way first.

“I hope we’ve learned some things from our past,” said Jimmy Makar, JRG’s vice president for racing operations. “We’ve figured out a couple of different ways to lose a championship, but we know how to win them, too. We’ve won with Bobby and Tony both. So I think we’re as strong as ever leading into this one. Our cars are competitive. We struggled on some of the big 2-mile tracks, and we don’t have any more of those to worry about. The mile-and-a-halfs are where we seem to have a little bit of a handle on what’s going on. So I’m excited. We keep ourselves in contention, we have a really good shot.”

On paper, it certainly seems that way. In his first year with the organization, Kenseth has enjoyed perhaps his best season ever to this point, leading the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series ranks with five victories. One year after missing the Chase, Busch has rebounded with a vengeance, winning four times and posting 11 top-fives. The only omission is Hamlin, whose year was sidetracked after he broke a back vertebra in a final-lap crash at Fontana in March, forcing him to sit out most of five races and miss the Chase for the first time in his career.

From a reliability standpoint, the biggest question surrounding the Gibbs organization for much of this year has concerned its engines, which are made by Toyota Racing Development. After a spate of failures earlier this season — including notable ones by Kenseth and Busch in the Daytona 500 — TRD cut back on horsepower in favor of reliability, gradually balancing the two. Prior to last weekend’s controversial regular-season finale at Richmond International Raceway, Kenseth and Busch had combined to win three times in four weeks, although that span did see failures by Hamlin and another Toyota driver, Clint Bowyer, at Atlanta.

In total, though, the JGR teams enter the Chase in the wake of one of their stronger stretches of the season, which buoys its drivers’ confidence in the organization’s quality control.

“I feel comfortable with it,” Busch said. “We’ve certainly had some issues. Last year, I went through a lot of quality control issues on my team, and the other teams didn’t for whatever reason. So, I guess I put that on God’s fate. Whatever he’s going to have in store for us this year. Truthfully, there’s nothing I can put my hands on and touch that’s going to make a difference. It’s going to be about what happens. We’ll play it out as it comes to us. Why I say all of that is because we’ve had really, really good races. Our worst finish of us running at the end of a race is 11th or 12th. Throw away Richmond — that don’t count. But the other races have been 30th or worse, and that’s been (when) things that have happened to us. I feel like our cars are really good.”

“I think you go out and try to do the best you can at all the things that you can control, and there’s a lot of things you just can’t control,” Kenseth added. “There’s a lot of parts and pieces that I can’t control. I think you go out and everything that you can do something about, you try to do to the very best of your ability. I know everybody else on the team is doing that as well. There’s certain things you just can’t control, and to worry about those things and stress about those things really isn’t productive, and really takes your time away from trying to be the best you can at the things you can control.”

The rest falls to people like Makar, who has implemented a system that analyzes potential failures and ranks them in terms of importance, from something relatively innocuous to larger problems capable of knocking a driver out of a race. Although the TRD engines have experienced their ups and downs this year, JGR hasn’t suffered anything catastrophic like Busch’s brake rotor failure last year at Pocono, or Hamlin’s master switch breakdown a year ago at Martinsville. While anything can still happen over 10 races, Makar feels positive about where the organization stands in terms of part reliability.

“I feel real comfortable with that,” he said. “We’ve put a lot of procedures and things in place to try and eliminate failures and bigger problems and things of that nature. You’re still dealing with human beings, and everybody’s got to go out and do their jobs, but I feel like there should be no reason for a part failure. We don’t have anything going on that would make me believe that would potentially be a problem.”

Which would certainly remove a potential hurdle in front of Busch or Kenseth, who along with five-time champion and No. 2 Chase seed Jimmie Johnson have emerged as the favorites to win this championship. At 41 and with a title to his credit from his days at Roush Fenway Racing, Kenseth brings a large degree of leadership and experience to a team that’s had a youthful lineup since Stewart left to form his own team in 2009. Makar likes the combination of two drivers from two different generations who go about things in two different ways, which has produced nine race wins between them at this point.

“Both of them are just doing really well,” he said. “They’re on their game, they’re doing the things it takes. We just need to keep the cars in contention, not have any problems. Our engine issues we’ve had come and go during the year, it sounds like TRD has their hands around it. But the engine deal is something you always worry about no matter where you are, because we push the things to such limits. But I think we’re in pretty good shape. Beating ourselves, that’s the thing I worry about more than us not being able to compete and be there.”

Which, in the end, may very well be what determines JGR’s fate over the course of this Chase, as it has in seasons past. While the first 26 races certainly offer promise, any mistakes are magnified in the final 10. And those mistakes will have to be minimized if a Gibbs driver is to break through and deliver the organization’s first premier-series championship in eight years.

“That’s to be seen,” Busch said. “We’ve got to prove ourselves first.”

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Now, Gordon will join the championship hunt as well, while Penske and Gilliland’s Front Row Motorsports team were placed on probation. It was a “multiple set of circumstances” that worked against the driver of the No. 24 car a week ago, France said, and led NASCAR to make a stunning addition to a playoff that’s consisted of 12 drivers each year since it was expanded from 10 in 2007.

It’s all leading NASCAR to call a mandatory meeting of drivers, owners and crew chiefs for early Saturday afternoon at Chicagoland “to hopefully to address and make more clear the path going forward as it applies to the rules of racing and the ethical part of it,” according to NASCAR President Mike Helton. Gordon, for one, is looking forward to it.

“I’m excited for this meeting tomorrow. I am. Even though I think we’re going to get reprimanded a little bit, because it doesn’t all lie on NASCAR. We all have a responsibility in this. But we are fierce competitors. I don’t think a fierce competitor can ever be torn down by trying to do everything they possibly can to win a race, to be in a championship battle, to win the championship and in some ways even to help out their teammates who helped them get to that point. That is what you’ve got to understand,” Gordon said.

“So because of that competitive drive, it pushes us sometimes to do things that even we question. I think that through all of this I think that, yes, the integrity of the sport has been put at question. I think we have one of the greatest sports that exists. To see our integrity get questioned is very upsetting to me, and I think we, along with NASCAR, have to solve this. I’m glad that we are going to get this opportunity to do this. I wish it had not happened under these circumstances. I really do wish we could have come to this conclusion sooner, but sometimes that’s just not the case.”

Teammates have always helped one another on the race track, abiding by a set of unspoken and undefined guidelines that have produced long-accepted tactics like allowing a driver to get a lap back, or allowing a driver to lead a lap to collect a bonus point. But with the championship field at stake, those actions become magnified — which was certainly the case at Richmond, where Bowyer spun suspiciously on his own and Vickers pitted unexpectedly on the final restart, opening the door for Truex to collect a Chase berth.

Penske and Front Row have a manufacturer, Ford, in common. After penalties levied against MWR Monday night, and Friday’s actions that once again modified the Chase picture, NASCAR officials felt it was time to set everyone down and perhaps create a more concrete set of ground rules.

“We’re going to have as much clarity to where the line is, and obviously we drew a line Monday night with the penalties with Michael Waltrip Racing,” France said. “So obviously what we’re going to do is … no matter what it takes, the integrity of the sport will never be in question. And that’s what we’re going to make sure, that we have the right rules going forward that are clear so that the integrity of the competitive landscape of the events are not altered in a way or manipulated. And that will be what we will be addressing.”

The meeting will be part of a process that will entail “clarifying in a significant way the rules of racing and the rules of the road going forward,” France added. He said the sanctioning body wants suggestions from competitors on how to do that.

“We owe it to the drivers, and we also want to get obviously input,” France said. “We will be explaining it to them and the crew chiefs and others before we’ll address that, but we certainly will address that. There are lines. They will be much clearer coming out of tomorrow than they are today. But listen, the most important thing is the integrity of the event, and we’ll deal with that.”

Carl Edwards believes it can be productive.

“That will be really good, I think, to have a meeting. … Actually, I even herd them say they were going to listen to some input, so that will be really neat,” he said. “That’s a big deal for Mike Helton and Brian France to put it out there and say they care this much about the integrity of the event. Because at the end of the day, that’s all we can hope for is to go out there and race in an event where the best man wins.”

Some drivers expect competitors to be taken to task. “I’m sure they’ll tell us what we can and can’t do,” Joey Logano said. Five-time Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson is bracing for something similar.

“I’m sure a lot of threats and things along side of that side of life,” he said when asked what he expected. “But I just don’t know, to be honest with you. This is something I’ve never seen or been a part of in my career. And to watch the sanctioning body react and respond, and how they’re going to police in the future — this is all new territory. So this is going to be a start of the process, and as the weeks come and the months come following it, we’ll continue to evolve the changes that are going to be put in place and continue to do a better job policing it.”

Johnson plans on doing more listening than talking, unless NASCAR solicits his opinion. “I’m just going to sit back and watch to see what happens,” he said. “There are lot of voices and a lot of peoples’ opinions and reactions right now. If my phone rings and NASCAR wants my opinion, I’m more than willing to give it. But I’m not going to go marching up in there with ideas anymore.”

Kasey Kahne questioned why the meeting was even necessary, given the clear chain of events in his mind that led to Gordon’s addition to the Chase on Friday.

“I feel like I have plenty of clarity. I feel like I know what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult,” Kahne said. “I think we all know where it started at Richmond. And I don’t understand all the rest. But I feel like I have plenty of clarity. I’m going to go tomorrow and sit in and make sure what I’m thinking is correct, but I don’t think I’m missing too much right now.”

Although adding an extra driver to the Chase is unprecedented in the event’s 10-year history, Helton said NASCAR has adjusted in the face of such issues before. He pointed to the practice of racing back to the yellow flag, which was eliminated in the wake of an race at New Hampshire in 2003 when Casey Mears nearly T-boned the disabled car of Dale Jarrett.

“We’ve had moments in the sport where NASCAR is reacting to what has evolved on the race track and through the teams’ actions, and we make a decision that shifts that paradigm, so to speak, and that’s what’s happened this week in part. … Some of you will remember we used to race back to the flag, and we didn’t. We stopped that. And when we decided that what was acceptable was no longer acceptable, it changed the paradigm,” Helton said.

“So that’s kind of the moment we’re in, that we’ll address with the teams and the media and the fans, as to what this shift means. As it comes to officiating, that goes along with it. So whatever our decision is on how that changes for the playing field for the teams, we’ll have to shift our officiating with it.  And as we talked on Monday night, what technologies and what we can use going forward to be more fair and precise and informed about what happens on the racetrack to use in order to regulate the sport, we’ll chase that, as well.”

First, though, comes Saturday’s meeting — even if reigning Sprint Cup champion Brad Keselowski would rather be doing something else.

“I am not looking forward to any of it,” Keselowski said. “Do you want to go in my place? You can have the inside source and I can get a nap.”

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READ: Driver previews: The Chase	READ: Fantasy preview: The Chase	READ: Race breakdowns: The Chase	READ: Top 10 Chase moments