In the end, it was Hamlin among the JGR drivers who challenged for the victory, but not before driving up through the field. Hamlin qualified eighth, but the engine in his No. 11 car broke a valve spring after the starting field was set, forcing a change under the hood and a move to the rear. Though Hamlin made the charge look easy, it was anything but, according to crew chief Darian Grubb, who used strategy to make up for shortcomings with the car.

“It was tougher than we thought,” Grubb said. “We really played the strategy well, and were able to pick up four, five spots each time we were able to play the strategy. But it was tougher than we thought it was going to be. We thought our car was a little better than it was, and we had to work on it all day. Sometimes that actually limited how far we could actually go on the strategy calls. But overall, a great day.”

And a great ending, as Hamlin dove low through the backstretch dogleg, looking for a moment as if he would vault from fourth to first. He actually passed Johnson for second, but had to hit the brakes and slow his momentum entering Turn 3, allowing the five-time champion to nudge back ahead. Up on the pit box, Grubb didn’t see it — he only heard the spotter calling that his car was three-wide and on the bottom.

“Then I saw the replay and realized we were 50 yards on the bottom,” Grubb said, laughing. “That was pretty impressive. I’ve really proud of Denny for going out there, after the day and the weekend we had, and him fighting as hard as he had to get that position. … We’ll take that after the weekend we had.”

Hamlin said he started plotting the move after he saw Keselowski and Johnson side-by-side for second. “I knew it was going to be interesting, at least for that lap, because Brad was driving so hard,” he said. “Eventually he was going to slide up, and he knew he was going to slide up, and he did and opened the door for me.”

Johnson said his spotter let him know the No. 11 car was coming. In his rearview mirror, he had an eyeful of the black and orange Toyota. “We all rolled in there without wrecking,” said Johnson, who barely hung on to second. “ When I first heard that we were three-wide, I was pretty concerned that I wasn’t going to have a clean lane to race in.”

Busch, meanwhile, was back in the pack. The earlier accident set off a string of events that made it difficult for the No. 18 car to climb back into contention: the vehicle’s splitter was dragging the ground, so crew had to raise the whole car up to get it clear of the asphalt, which, in turn, compromised its aerodynamic properties and grip. Meanwhile Busch struggled to get back on the lead lap, not receiving the free pass until after David Gilliland’s accident with just 79 laps remaining.

"I just tried to get too much too early,” Busch said. “We came from the back and had worked out way up through there, but our car was really loose, especially in traffic. I came up on Carl getting into (Turn) 2, and it just came around on me. We just kept fighting for the lucky dog and finally got it there, but it was too late to get back up toward the front."

 “We just hurt the car so bad,” added Rogers, whose vehicle was one of the fastest in practice and qualified fourth at Phoenix, but wound up 23rd in the race. “… Once we got on the lead lap we started making up spots and thought we were OK, but we lost all of our grip. You can live on tire grip for a while, but you need that downforce. But we killed the downforce by raising the car up.”

That much was evident when Busch nearly wiggled up into the wall again while decelerating to avoid the slowing car of his brother Kurt.

Kyle Busch had to start in the rear because a spring was replaced improperly in his engine, which caused something in the valve train to break after it was restarted on Sunday morning. It was the fourth terminal failure involving Toyota Racing Development engines in the first two weeks of this season, including a pair of breakdowns — one each for Busch and teammate Matt Kenseth — in the Daytona 500.

Sunday, TRD senior vice president David Wilson said none of those issues were related, and that the company was working to restore confidence at JGR and Michael Waltrip Racing, which both use their product. After the race, Hamlin said that will come only with time.

“Until we run a whole weekend and not have problems, it will be a concern,” he said. “But it doesn’t alter how we approach every weekend. We’re going to drive the cars as hard as we can, because that’s what we’re supposed to do to win. We can’t try to make up for what we don’t have as far as reliability.”

Grubb added that he had no qualms about the engine used in Hamlin’s car Sunday, and will go into next weekend’s event at the high-speed Las Vegas Motor Speedway with the same confidence as always.

“They’re working really closely with us. Anytime we have an issue, we all dig into it to try and figure out what’s going on,” he said. “Luckily, nothing that they’ve had have really been recurring issues. Everything seems a little bit different. So we’re trying to dissect it just as much as they are, and help them out. We don’t know if we’re doing things wrong as a team individually, or if it’s the engine parts and pieces. We’re just trying to work together on all that, and we’ll go into next week with as much confidence as we’ve had all along. That’s what we have to do.”

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“This is a very emotionally charged situation that we find ourselves in,” David Wilson, senior vice president at TRD, said Sunday morning. “… The part that’s difficult is the timing of this. Ultimately it becomes a psychological challenge to keep everyone focused and confident. The bottom line is, we need to get some success under our belt, and go out there and win today, and that will start the healing process. In the meantime, on the engineering side, we’re working on this 24/7.”

The issue is clearly frustrating to JGR drivers who have been bitten by part failures before. “We’ve got to have engines that last,” Busch said in the aftermath of his engine failure last week at Daytona. After learning that Busch also had to change engines at Phoenix, Hamlin tweeted a succinct message Sunday: “Sigh … Unreal.”

Wilson said TRD officials met with JGR and Michael Waltrip Racing ownership on Sunday morning to explain the recent engines failures, after doing the same Friday with crew chiefs on Toyota cars. The two problems at Phoenix, he added, proved unrelated — Hamlin’s engine broke a valve spring just 61 laps into the life of the motor, while Busch’s was the victim of a spring that was replaced incorrectly.

Regarding Hamlin’s problem, “All indications are, it was just a fluke,” Wilson said. “It’s probably an imperfection in the wire, in the spring, that we’ll find once we dig into it once we get back to the shop.”

In effort to improve reliability, Wilson said the springs in TRD engines are changed the night before a race. One of those was replaced incorrectly in Busch’s Phoenix engine, which cause something to snap in the drive train when it was restarted on Sunday morning.

“Human error,” Wilson said. “So there wasn’t anything wrong with the 18 motor. It was just again, in a course of getting it back together … that human error was made, and it caused a failure once the engine was restarted.”

Those failures are different, Wilson said, from the ones that plagued the TRD engines a week ago at Daytona. Busch’s was a valve train problem that was also seen in the Toyota cars of MWR’s Martin Truex Jr. and Swan Racing’s Michael Waltrip, though those latter two issues were not terminal. Kenseth’s engine suffered what Wilson termed a bottom-end problem. “It was something we hadn’t seen before,” he said. “I think we’re confident that we have that handled.”

Wilson said the Daytona failures occurred in engines that are configured specifically for restrictor-plate tracks, and are different from those used at more traditional venues. “We have to take Daytona and put it off on its own island compared to what we’re dealing with this weekend,” he added. “We have no cause to believe there’s a connection, there’s a thread there. It’s the timing that leads you to lump them all in — well, Toyota’s in big trouble.”

JGR has borne the brunt of these early-season engine problems, and has battled other quality-control issues in recent years. But Wilson was adamant that the recent spate of failures rested with Toyota, and not any specific organization.

“I know the way this is getting labeled is as JGR-specific,” he said. “… There’s no bearing between JGR and MWR. We build exactly the same pieces for each of them. It’s a purely random coincidence. As to TRD, these are our responsibilities. Whether it’s a part failure or not, we take responsibility for those.”

It’s clearly a trying issue for a manufacturer that otherwise has shown plenty of performance — Kenseth was the driver to beat at Daytona before his problem, Busch has been speedy in each of the first two weekends, and MWR’s Mark Martin has been the class of Phoenix to this point. And next weekend looms the first intermediate-track event at a fast Las Vegas track that’s capable of taxing engines under any circumstances.

“Emotionally, this is hard,” Wilson said. “And psychologically, what we’re dealing with now is an issue of confidence with our teams, drivers and crew chiefs because of the timing of these incidents. It’s easy to lump this together and say, Toyota has a problem. There’s no cause for concern from strictly an engineering perspective that we have going to Vegas next week. We look forward to going to Vegas. We’ve done a lot of work. You can see by looking at the timing and scoring sheets of any practice and qualifying, we’ve got enough performance. What we don’t clearly have is enough margin in safety, and that’s where our focus is.”

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