BROOKLYN, MICH. - A year ago, the talk of the NASCAR Sprint Cup garage was that there was something terribly wrong with the Toyota program, that the once-top-notch Toyota Racing Development team had lost its touch in finding ways to match the horsepower being produced in the Chevrolet and Ford camps.

No one is saying those sort of things anymore.

Matt Kenseth’s absolutely dominating victory Sunday afternoon at Michigan International Speedway in the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Camry spoke volumes of how far Toyota has come in one calendar year.

In the past seven Sprint Cup races, starting with the Kyle Busch comeback win Sonoma, a Toyota has been on the top step of the podium six times.

Not only that, but with three races left before the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Championship launches at Chicagoland Speedway on Sept. 20, the Gibbs Toyota team has all four of its drivers in stock car’s version of post-season play.

Coach Gibbs, he of the three Super Bowl rings with the Washington NFL franchise, never gave up on Toyota even as others were ganging up on them.

“Well, the first thing is it’s a team sport all the way,” Gibbs said after Kenseth’s win on Sunday. “We’ve got great partners, thanks to Toyota, all the hard work they’ve done over the last year and a half.”

He did admit that TRD had fallen off the pace in producing big, power engines, but he said he knew they would turn the corner sooner rather than later.

“I think we were behind,” Gibbs said.

The turnaround for Toyota did come and it came spectacularly over the past two months.

“I can’t remember where we’ve kind of had a stretch like this over these past 10 weeks or so, starting at Charlotte, and so, you know, you really want to enjoy those,” Gibbs said. “They’re hard to get, and pro sports, I think that’s the reason why we all love it so much.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen from week to week.”

While many are now pointing to the four Gibbs drivers — Kenseth, Busch, Denny Hamlin and Carl Edwards — as favourites to win a first Sprint Cup championship for the team since Tony Stewart did it in 2005, Kenseth was more reticent.

“It’s early to talk favourites — there’s so much racing to do and there are 16 teams that are capable of winning races on a weekly basis as well as a championship,” he said. “It’s one week at a time like always.

“It’s been a great week and we’ve had a great couple months; we definitely have some momentum built.

“We’re just going to work hard to try to keep it rolling.”

Kenseth also does not want to get caught up in the hype of the current winning streak because he knows how fast those things can change.

In the 2013 season — his first with Gibbs — Kenseth went on a winning rampage with seven visits to Victory Lane, but after the final win that season at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, he went cold.

So cold that he went 51 consecutive races without a win before clicking again at Bristol in the spring of this year.

“To win at the Sprint Cup level to me is a huge deal,” Kenseth said on Sunday. “It’s something that doesn’t happen very often and you have to enjoy each and every one of them.

“We just got done going before April or whatever, we went 50 races or something like that without a win, so you’d better enjoy them all and appreciate them all.

“We work hard at Joe Gibbs Racing for each and every race because they’re all huge events and we treat them all like that.”

Busch, of course, is enjoying a comeback season to match that of Toyota, having raced in only 12-of-23 races, but winning four of those in the No. 18 Toyota, so he sees first-hand how the fortunes of the manufacturer have changed.

“It’s really good times for Joe Gibbs Racing right now, the guys are doing a great job,” he said after his 11th-place finish at Michigan.

But he too, like Kenseth, warns that as fast as the wins have come so far this season, the string could end just as quickly.

“The thing that amazes me sometimes is the quick turn where you go the other way and so we’ve just got to keep working hard,” he said.