Jack Roush oversees five cars in the Chase; he might not have five cars in any Cup race much longer. Credit: Autostock

Car of Tomorrow might be here sooner than later

By Ron Lemasters Jr., Special to NASCAR.COM

Much has been made of NASCAR's ongoing Car of Tomorrow project, which is an effort to design a race car with safety first and foremost in mind.

Nobody can argue that safety -- for drivers and spectators -- is not a good thing, but there is an argument about the timing and the effect such a sweeping change will have on NASCAR teams and the people who pay for them -- car owners and sponsors.

	NASCAR CEO Brian France wants to limit the number of cars one team can have. Credit: Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
	ALSO •   Roush unhappy with NASCAR's plans to limit muticar teams

In the week following a NASCAR "trial balloon" on limiting the number of cars an owner can field, there was some discussion of the Car of Tomorrow, which had its first superspeedway test recently at Talladega.

In particular, Jack Roush commented at length on the business aspects of the Car of Tomorrow during a news conference at Kansas Speedway.

Roush has in the past had some reservations about that timing, and he opened up a little more last weekend, saying that while he was still having some thoughts about the program, he was at least somewhat optimistic that NASCAR will do right by the teams by not making all their current rolling stock obsolete with the stroke of a pen.

"For the time being, I'm guardedly optimistic," Roush said. "They [NASCAR] did in fact call a second meeting that I and a number of the other owners were asked to participate in and they did ask our input as far as scheduling and some other things that wasn't on the table -- at least it wasn't on the table for me previously.

"If they can move the dates out, so that we're able to balance out our existing hardware, and be able to make the changes they want with the present staff, it'll be a seamless transition at a modest cost to the teams.

"If they compress that to where you have to dig a hole and bury your existing cars, you haven't got value out of them regardless of whether you might have a strategy with the IRS or a strategy with investment folks, whoever they would be, that says that you're able to amortize your car by using it the amount of time that you expected when you built it, well then there's a loss.

"Given the number of cars that are potentially involved, the loss could be huge. It could be catastrophic."

ALSO •   More business news and features •   Have a story idea for Ron? Click here  to send it!

He's right. Were such a rule to come down from NASCAR at the end of this season for 2006, team owners would have to dig that hole and bury their cars, or make very speedy planters out of them.

Roush, who owns five teams in Nextel Cup, three Busch Series teams and a pair of Craftsman Trucks, has about 100 cars in his inventory, give or take, and junking all of them would be, in his words, catastrophic. Rick Hendrick, Ray Evernham, Joe Gibbs and other multicar teams have similar problems.

"I am in support of anything we can do for safety and I certainly am not resistant to anything that we could do to make the cars easier to regulate and litigate and safer for the drivers," Roush said. "We want all of that.

"The car of today is not the same as the car of yesterday [or] at any point in time in the reasonable past, so looking forward, if they'll come back and relent to the timing that was proposed by the owners -- the change to this car is something that certainly can be achieved without dire consequences to the viability of the teams nor the quality of the racing, I think."

Most people figure the changeover would be in time for the 2007 season, but even that is a stretch, Roush said.

"That is not the schedule that we talked about and we asked them to go back and look at it," he said. "That would be a problem.

"One of the things that winds up being a problem here is, if you look, say, in my world a team can build about a car a month. If you've got four teams, let's say it's five cars a month, but a car a month.

"If you're racing and you figure out that you need to have a car a month, that means in a year you can only build six cars that were toward something with the same people.

"Now if you say, 'I need to build twice that many cars,' then I need to go get Chip Ganassi's people to work for me, or Rick's people to work for me, or Ray's people to work for me. So the owners wind up being in a situation where they don't have the capacity -- not withstanding the philosophy investment of their cars -- they wind up not having the capacity to respond to that, and that was the thing that we begged for. I'll be curious to see if they're willing to go there or not."

Roush said that despite what he was told, it just might be 2007 that the new car makes its debut.

"I know that's not the schedule that they had their mind set on before we had our meeting and they may not go there," he said. "They may go back and say, 'Guys, we hate it for you, but it's 2007. Build your cars and go fight among yourselves and decide how you're gonna do it and we don't care.'"

Regardless of how it plays out, NASCAR's teams are going to be busy building the Car of Tomorrow -- today.