What's the COST of the COT? Nobody's saying

BRISTOL, Tenn. -- The Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway was a race of many facets.

Sure, Kyle Busch walked off with the winner's trophy, gave Chevrolet its 600th NASCAR victory and Rick Hendrick his 200th as a car owner, but those are just milestones.

The biggest concern was the Car of Tomorrow, which made its debut on the .533-mile short track.

On a day where the winner celebrated in Victory Lane by reaffirming his dislike for the new piece and the man who led the most laps (Tony Stewart) now has reason to dislike it even more, one substantial constituency finally spoke up on the COT: car owners.

The fact that NASCAR took the winning car and a few others to its R&D Center in Concord for post-race testing leaves Busch's team one COT short heading to Martinsville this week, though NASCAR promised it would have the car back at Hendrick Motorsports in good time.

Following Busch's victory, Hendrick joined driver and crew chief in the post-race media conferences, where he was hit with the following question: What was the cost of this car, to make a winner out of it?

"I think that everybody is in the same boat," Hendrick said. "We're building intermediate cars and we've got to build these cars. When you're running parallel programs and you're working on different chassis and waiting for the chassis to be approved, it's a chore.

"We'll run a couple races and we'll go back to our intermediate cars. If we had a wreck, if somebody had a car that wasn't as good as it should be in Atlanta, we're getting a lot of work done to go to Texas. So it's hard to run these different cars but it's just part of the program."

In other words, he wasn't answering the question.

"When the decision's been made that we're going to bring this car along, I think everybody's trying to work to make sure we do the best we can," Hendrick continued, giving further credence that Hendrick knows how to play the game.

"I think definitely it was the right thing to do to bring it to the short tracks first because we're going to probably have some rule changes and some things are going to happen as we get to intermediates and probably to speedways, too. It's going to be something that's going to develop over time and it's never easy when you've got ... nobody would like to have to come out with a whole new fleet, either, so I think NASCAR did the best they could after the decision was made to race it to bring it to short tracks first." (Continued)