In the Field: Elliott Sadler

I know it's Halloween, and I was all excited about my first holiday in my new house down in Charlotte, but I almost felt like I got a sneak preview of that at the two-day test of the Car of Tomorrow at Atlanta.

It was a pretty neat test because there were a lot of different drivers in different cars, getting ready for next season. You were looking around going, 'What's he doing in that car? Oh yeah -- he's going into that car.'

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So it was funny looking at NASCAR live timing & scoring screens at the test on Monday morning -- less than 24 hours after the Atlanta race had finished -- and seeing everybody with different cars and different numbers beside their names.

It took a while, but you'd say, 'Oh yeah, he is going to be driving that car, isn't he?' It's a good thing we had that little preview to 2008, when we'll really have some new looks to get used to.

Like Dale Jr. said on Monday, being there for that test was a strain. They were two long days we put in with the cars, on Monday and Tuesday -- but in the end that meant that I had been in Atlanta, in the cars, six days in a row, from Thursday to Tuesday.

So you can believe it was pretty good to get to come back home on Tuesday night, to get ready for Halloween on Wednesday.

As far as the new car itself went, I feel like it's going to be a lot tougher racing with these COTs on the big mile-and-a-half racetracks, because these things punch such a big hole in the air, that I think we're going to have a little bit of that aero push problem.

But it drove a little bit better than I thought it was going to, actually. You have to move your line around a lot with them, to find the place that they want to run the best at -- kind of like you did with the old car.

Some guys were right up against the wall and some guys were right on the bottom. But the biggest unknown is that until we get in that big, heavy traffic, we won't really know what to expect when we're racing these cars.

We didn't really run very much, very hard together, side-by-side or anything like that. It was more of people just doing their own thing. There were a few people racing, but nothing extremely major.

So we think we're going to have some of the aero push stuff to work through, when we get to California and Las Vegas next year for our first big races with this thing, so we'll see how it works out.

We want to try to seal these cars up to the racetrack. We all know that, whether it's the old car or the new car, if you can seal it up -- and what I mean by that is to put the front splitter or the front valance on the racetrack, with the tail up.

If you can do that, you're going to create more downforce and you're going to be more comfortable as a driver and you're going to run better. We had that figured out in the old car, but we don't have it figured out with the new car, yet.

So we're going to keep working on it. We have to, because we haven't gotten there yet. I think that's going to be the biggest thing that we need to work on -- getting that thing sealed off all the way around the racetrack -- where even on the straightaway you can keep it down.

One thing that got all of our attention was Kyle Busch being at the top of the speed chart for all four sessions of the test. It tells us No. 1, how good Gibbs' stuff is going to be. Kyle and Denny [Hamlin] were both real fast and it almost looked like they were doing a 'if you can do this, I can do it one better' kind of deal, you know?

So I think those guys are going to be strong. You know, Gibbs and Hendrick were the first ones to really get their flat-track stuff going the best, with this COT. If you look back at the beginning of the year, where Gibbs led all the laps and Hendrick won all the races.

It looks like that's pretty much where we are, again. You've got to start all over again for your mile-and-a-half program, because these cars want something just a little bit different than they wanted in the past, and you can tell that Gibbs and Hendrick still have an edge on everybody with their COT program.

They were the fastest Tuesday, especially the Gibbs cars, and I tell you, they were really setting the bar pretty high.

This weekend at Texas, I am getting back in the Busch car, where I'm going to run our Auto Value/Bumper to Bumper Charger. I am really looking forward to that because I am a Busch racing fan, and I wish I ran more Busch races than I do.

Elliott Sadler, now in his ninth full season in the Cup Series, shares weekly with NASCAR.COM readers life on the road through staff writer Dave Rodman.