Inside the Garage: Reiser (cont'd)

Q: Jack Roush had said his teams were going to begin testing more, so what's the test program been like for your team, and what's the summer looking like regarding testing?

Reiser: We've definitely tested more with the COT at Roush Fenway -- more than we have in the past. We have a group of people that are working on all sorts of things for COT racing coming up -- not so much looking at it as short term, but looking at it long term.

We have a group that's committed to just going off and doing seven-post testing and APG testing and track tests -- whatever our teams have to have to support them, we're off doing.

Q: When you look ahead to running the Car of Tomorrow on intermediate racetracks, are there any concerns about it?

Reiser: You know, you can be concerned about a lot of things, but here's the deal: It's a racecar and we've got to make it run. The rules aren't going to change and they're not going to take the car away tomorrow. It's the car that we've got to race, so we've got to go into the mile-and-a-half tracks and look at those with a lot of determination and wanting to get that car to run.

It's just going to require so much testing and so much time to make that what it is, and that's just what we've got to do -- no different than if the current car was a new car -- we'd have to handle that the same way.

With the COT, we've just got to put the time into it, run the car, learn things about and make it work on those mile-and-a-half tracks. Surely there are concerns, when you don't have travel in the [front suspensions] of the cars and you've got to work with the splitter and you've got to work with the wing.

These are all things that are unknowns to us that we're slowly getting caught up on, on the short tracks that will also create a lot of challenges on the bigger tracks, as we go there.

But it's a learning process for everyone, and everyone's in the same boat -- so we've just got to go there and do it.

Q: Maybe a silly question, because you guys are third in the points after running eight COT races, but how disruptive has it been having to go back and forth between the two styles of cars?

Reiser: It's been a lot of work for everybody, and I think everybody will tell you that. When you have a current car that you're still doing development work on and you're trying to make it better for each and every race -- because you do have five of those races in the Chase -- you've got to commit to that car also.

And then you come along with a brand-new car that nobody knows nothing about, and you've got to pretty much develop it from the ground-up. That requires a huge amount of work to get that up and running. So you actually have two challenges this year that I don't think everybody was quite set for in this garage and how much work it was going to be.

I don't care if you're running good or running bad -- it still required about the same amount of work.