Teams starting to increase COT fleets just at right time

Ronnie Hoover and the boys in the fabrication shop at Richard Childress Racing have proven that a wrecked Car of Tomorrow can be returned to service virtually as quickly as a damaged "standard" Nextel Cup car.

And according to Hoover, RCR's fab shop manager, NASCAR will be flexible enough with its inspection parameters to enable teams to quickly get their COTs back into action.

Clint Bowyer, who drives RCR's No. 07 Chevrolet, plans to use the same Chevrolet Impala SS chassis this weekend that he wrecked on March 1 on the final morning of a two-day en masse COT test at Bristol.

Hoover said that, other than a phenomenon he said teams will find widespread with the COT, there were few issues with getting the car ready to get back on track -- despite Bowyer's shock at how much it was damaged in the crash.

"That car was hit on the right-front corner," Hoover said. "But it was kinked on the left side, as well, because of the way the entire car is put together.

"Still, we had it back in the fab shop the morning after we got back, and it was there three days, then four more days getting finished -- and it was ready to go again."

But the real test will come next week, following Sunday's Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway, and in the ensuing weeks when three of the next four Nextel Cup Series races -- five of the next seven races over eight weeks -- are COT events.

Hoover was impressed with the way he said NASCAR's inspectors worked with him when Bowyer's primary car was repaired.

"The car was not quite as perfect as it was when it was first built," Hoover said. "But NASCAR told us to bring it anyway."

Fixing post-race damage is only one aspect teams are facing, beginning this weekend. The COT has two new elements that mount on the racecars basically parallel to the track surface, and both of them are vital components in enabling a damaged car to continue competing.

A splitter is mounted to the bottom of the car's nose and a wing, with vertical end plates on either side, is mounted above the back of the rear deck lid.

"I think by rolling it out at the places they've decided to, you're going to see a minimal amount of impact when a crash happens and a splitter gets ripped off," Hall of Fame Racing crew chief Brandon Thomas said. "Obviously, nobody is going to want to run it without the rear wing on -- you're not even allowed to.

"Even at a place like Bristol that'd be a hairy proposition."

Roush Racing crew chief Bob Osborne agreed with Thomas, saying he'd rather not experience how much time it would take to make in-race repairs.

"The Car of Tomorrow is going to be quite challenging, especially at a place like Bristol [because] with the cars we have today, if you wreck, you come in the pits and beat and bang and patch up your car and you're back on the track," Osborne said. "It's not going to be that simple with the COT.

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"If you lose your wing, you'll have to pretty much replace your deck lid, which will not be a quick fix, especially at a short track like Bristol."

After the two-day Bristol test at the beginning of the month, Bobby Labonte said the "jury of the fans" would be out on the COT until after Sunday, at least.

"I don't think you're going to be able to knock anybody out of the way with that thing [because] if you knock the front off and that thing [wing] off the back you're done," Labonte said. "That's probably the worst thing. If you get out and do something wrong, and come into the pits to fix it, I'm not sure you can fix it now.

"If there's 22 cars at the end of the race and nobody riding around because they can't fix their stuff, those people in the stands will dictate what it's going to be."

Thomas was on the engineering staff at Joe Gibbs Racing when the development of the Car of Tomorrow began and he had extensive experience with it there, on a variety of tracks.

"The wing is mandatory, just like the spoiler is in the current rules [and] obviously, it's mandatory because no one in their right mind would want to drive without it," Thomas said. "So it causes you to build wreck-repair carts the same way we build wreck-repair carts now.

"The splitter really changes things because it's so sensitive. It's not like running through the grass now and bending the valance in and coming in and hammering it back out.

"If you run through the grass and tear up the mounts for the splitter, now you've got to have a whole lower nose to put on the car to get a splitter back on there.

"The next six months is going to be a real rapid pace of development of pieces and parts to try and get a car repaired during a race."

Kevin Harvick, a former Bristol winner, was one driver who was not particularly concerned about splitter durability when questioned at the Bristol test.

"I was a little bit, I guess, not very knowledgeable about the splitter material -- what it was," Harvick said. "I'll be honest with you, at California, on the 33 truck [Kevin Harvick Inc. driver Ron Hornaday's Chevrolet], we drug the ground every lap. The splitter was fine after the race.

"I don't think the splitter's going to be a problem. We sat on it [and] drug it across the racetrack. It just kind of turns almost into like a hard little plastic ball. I think you can drag a lot. I think it's going to be pretty durable. I think they've definitely picked the right material for it.

"I was a little bit wary of the splitter. I think after watching Hornaday drag his truck all across the racetrack [at California], it ran 200, 250 miles. I think the material's going to be great."

The ironic thing about NASCAR's deployment strategy for the COT is that the cars are being debuted at tracks that are least aero-dependent, but most apt to result in damage.

The first five races are scheduled at Bristol, Martinsville (the circuit's shortest venue at .526 miles), Phoenix (a flat, 1-mile oval), Richmond (a high-banked, .750-mile oval) and Darlington (a variably banked, 1.366-mile oval).

Getting a fleet of COTs on the ground and ready to race has been something of an issue for some teams, but Hoover's group, which like virtually every other organization, has continued to work on its standard fleet while also preparing COTs.

Hoover said that, without taking into account what happens at Bristol -- the .533-mile, 36-degree banked oval that is notorious for taking a toll on equipment -- RCR will have 12 ready-to-race COTs by the Monday before Martinsville's Goody's Cool Orange 500, the next COT race on April 1.

That's four cars for each of the teams RCR fields for drivers Bowyer, Harvick and Jeff Burton. Gibbs Racing also has at least four cars ready for each of its three teams, with others under way.

"Each one of our teams has four COTs done and every team has a fifth one but they're not done," Paul Menard's crew chief Tony Eury said Thursday of the situation at Dale Earnhardt Inc. "Some are still in the fab shop, a couple of them are in the body shop -- but most of the teams and people that we talked to here [Thursday], some of 'em are bringing their backup cars here [Friday] because they're not done yet.

"That, kind of makes you feel pretty good that we did get a head start, a little bit, on some people. It's just not very many people that have very many cars right now."

But teams' levels of preparation run the gamut from RCR and DEI, which intend to have separate primary and backup cars ready for both Bristol and Martinsville, to teams that have just two COTs ready.

Frank Kerr, crew chief for Michael Waltrip Racing's No. 00 Toyota, said his organization's three teams each had only two cars ready -- one primary car for each event.

Wood Brothers/JTG Racing has three fully decked-out COTs ready for the next two weekends, while Furniture Row Racing also has three cars that were built earlier this year by Cal Wells' PPI Motorsports.

Ginn Racing has three cars apiece for its three teams, and Roush Racing and Ganassi Racing each have at least a pair of cars for its five, and three teams, respectively.

Hall of Fame Racing, another single-car team that is affiliated with Joe Gibbs Racing, has three cars built, a fourth it expects to be complete the week after Bristol and a fifth it will immediately start, Thomas said.

Petty Enterprises has four cars ready for its two teams to use at Bristol, and plans to have two more prepared when the series goes to Martinsville, but its lead driver, Labonte, is worried -- despite Hoover's experience.

"We are going to race this new car three of four times pretty quick," Labonte said. "We know Bristol will be a good race. We then go to Martinsville and Phoenix [so] I hope everyone has enough cars built.

"If you tear one of these cars up, from what I've seen, it's going to be very difficult to get the car fixed for the next race. It just takes too much time to get the cars to fit the templates if you need to repair one.

"Hopefully our Dodges will be up front and we won't have to worry about that."

The premise of the COT, according to NASCAR, has been driver safety, better racing and cost savings to team owners. The proof of each of those won't come in the short term.

But Robbie Loomis, executive director of race operations for Petty Enterprises, which was one of the first organizations to get whole-heartedly behind the COT program, was optimistic on the eve of this weekend.

"I think the biggest thing I keep drawing back to is it's complicated, it's going to bring a lot of challenges," Loomis said. "I think the potential's definitely there.

"The great ones are going to figure it out and it will be a great race coming down to that last lap. Everybody will be talking about the last lap at Bristol [Monday] instead of the Car of Tomorrow."

But Hoover and Thomas agreed that the reality still is catching up on inventory and dealing with a situation Hoover called "liquid."

"You're not just thinking about one style of car, you're thinking about two completely different styles of cars right now," Thomas said. "I'm very much looking forward to the day that this transition is over -- whatever that path ends up being."

Hoover said teams received a bulletin from NASCAR on Tuesday that indicated additional dimensional changes.

"I really honestly think there will be several tweaks to this car before it is the car, set in stone, and [teams will be able to] run it all year long," Thomas said.