In the Field: Elliott Sadler

I can't even begin to tell you how much it meant for our Gillett Evernham Motorsports team to achieve the results it did last weekend at Kansas Speedway.

My No. 19 Charger guys earned us the best finish we'd had -- eighth -- since the Daytona 500 and I'm going to tell you, that's a long darned time for the amount of effort they've been putting in.

My teammates, Kasey Kahne and Scott Riggs, were ninth and 13th -- so it was a great day for Gillett Evernham and finally some payback for the guys. I said it recently and I don't mind saying it again -- these guys have been busting their butts.

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If you're running in the front that's one thing, and I'm not taking anything away from those guys. But when you're running between 15th and 30th, you're working almost twice as hard because you're forever cutting and hacking and rebuilding and trying to get your stuff right.

Last Sunday, the conditions weren't real great for anyone -- but we kept our heads down all day and in the end, it paid off for us.

It might have been pretty dark when that race got over, but there was a lot of light shining around our entire team. My pit crew delivered all day long -- they had to go through those two rain delays and that's a real test to your ability to focus and keep yourself in the game.

And the way we've been running sometimes this year, well, because of the way we've struggled our guys haven't much been in the position where cracking off good, quick pit stops -- time after time -- is the difference between a top-10 finish and finishing somewhere below 20th.

My guys did the job Sunday, over and over -- and I can't tell them how much I appreciated that.

We're pretty excited about having four more races on similar tracks to Kansas remaining as the Chase winds down, at Charlotte, Atlanta, Texas and Homestead. With the way we all ran, you can bet we can't wait to get there because we'd all been qualifying pretty decent, but the race results had been eluding us.

That wasn't the case at Kansas, and that was great for everyone's spirits on the team.

But now, before we have another standard car event -- and as we count down through the last four times we'll ever race those cars -- we have a race that I think everyone is anticipating, and I can't swear it's with good or bad feelings.

Talladega this weekend is going to be wild, and that's saying something considering how nerve-wracking these races have been in the past.

We tested the Car of Tomorrow at Talladega for two days last month, and as I told you then, there are some concerns about how well you can see out the fronts of these cars -- particularly since you can't see through or really around the car in front of you very well.

These COTs really punch a big hole in the air, so you can pull up on the cars in front of you real well. Once you get there, as we've seen everywhere with the COT, the bumpers match up so well we were just knocking the crap out of each other, bump-drafting.

But having said that, the bumpers on these cars -- especially the rear ones -- aren't indestructible. So we'll just have to see where that leads us. And that's the biggest problem I've seen with these cars, there. Seeing is the problem. When you're in the draft, it's just like following a tractor trailer down the interstate -- you just can't see around him.

And at the speeds we travel there, whether or not that will create any big problems is anyone's guess.