Inside the Garage: Martin

Teams have rarely faced as many unknowns entering a Nextel Cup race as they do this weekend, when the Car of Tomorrow visits Talladega Superspeedway. It's a volatile combination: a facility infamous for producing large-scale accidents, a car that's been on the 2.66-mile track for all of two test days, and 12 drivers vying for the series championship.

One of those drivers is Clint Bowyer, a second-year pilot at Richard Childress Racing competing in the Chase for the Nextel Cup for the first time. Calling the race-day shots for Bowyer is Gil Martin, a native of Nashville, Tenn., and an eight-year RCR employee who's also worked with Robby Gordon and Kevin Harvick. Martin became Bowyer's Busch crew chief in 2005, and moved up to the Nextel Cup tour with his driver the next season.

Bowyer hasn't had the best of luck at Talladega, crashing out of two of three starts on the big track and never finishing better than 35th. But RCR has traditionally been one of the top teams in NASCAR on restrictor-plate tracks, with 14 victories combined at Talladega and Daytona International Speedway, where Harvick won the season-opening Daytona 500.

Q: From a crew chief's perspective, what kind of unknowns do you face at Talladega this weekend?

Martin: Our major concern is what these cars are going to draft like in a 43-car pack. We drafted in 10-, 12-car, very small packs [at the test], and we don't know what's going to happen when we get 43 of them. With that being said, we also don't know the speeds we're going to run. We've got some concerns, too, that NASCAR may change the wicker, the plate size, and everything we learned in testing. So everything we learned at testing may go away, and we'll be faced with something else. We need to be prepared for all kinds of scenarios, just because there is so much unknown going into the race.

Q: You're going to race this car full time next season. How little do you still know about it?

Martin: I think the majority of this COT car is an unknown for us, because of the fact that we haven't raced them on a mile-and-half track yet, because of the fact that we haven't drafted them in huge packs yet. It's still unknown how far you can lay back before you actually lose the draft at Talladega. There are so many unknowns that we have. The known column is very short right now.

Q: Any idea what the full-field draft at Talladega might be like with the COT?

Martin: I think these cars, they're going to have a lot larger closing rate. They're going to close a lot faster. And also, too, it looks like these cars are easier to bump-draft. When I say easier, I mean I think they can get there before the driver knows it. At Talladega, we saw a lot of guys with the front bumper and the rear bumper hooked together all the way around the racetrack. Obviously, when we go back, NASCAR is going to mandate that there be no bump-drafting in the corners and the tri-oval. But with that being said, the cars are going to be easier to do that with. It's going to be easier to make a mistake that it was in the past.