It has never happened to me and I know it never will, but this is my take on it. I think that there may be penalties for websites building a lot of links in an "unnatural" way in a short time (too fast). This issue often applies to spammers, scrapers, or people who own hundreds or thousands of domains and work to build their internet and Search Engine status by interlinking between them. For example, if you generate 1,500 links in 3 hours from ONLY Blogger blogs (for example), yes, that *could* raise a red flag in the search engines eyes. Which in turn, you would be penalized. Now, have any of you ever had this happen to you; your website being penalized for building backlinks too fast? If so, what did the Search Engines do with your website, and actually, what did you do to go about fixing it?
it seems if they did this we could set up a script to constantly build backlinks to competitors at a rapid rate in hopes to get them penalized. I think what Google does is just ignore suspicious linking and you get no credit for them. I have seen my site drop for a day or two after concentrating on backlinks but it always came back better than before.
If you get to many backlinks at once it could be a problem allot of article submission directories just submit your articles all at once but I found a directory that actually has a timed release system that submits your article and builds links all at once so you don't run into problems the directory is called http://marketmypressrelease.com/
my speculation is .. if the link is artificial.. it does not matter how "fast" it gets to that point.. you will have the same result... the fast linking method you describe will not work well for competitive phrase.. for long tail maybe.. but as far as too fast concerned.. you can slow it down but it won't matter much... i would say link it in a hard way.. from influential sites.. will achieve better result