Inspection process fine ... depending on point of view

BRISTOL, Tenn. -- John Darby seemed perfectly content, even outwardly pleased, with the inspection process for the first Car of Tomorrow race in Nextel Cup history.

The same couldn't be said for everyone who took part in the often tedious event on Thursday. It took some cars more than six hours from the time they got in line for the inspection until they received their approval stickers to take the cars onto the track in preparation for Sunday's Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Once they reached the front of the line, the inspection process on average appeared to take at least twice as long as it normally does -- and sometimes twice more as long as that. Still, Darby said that none of this was unexpected and explained that this is why NASCAR set up inspections one day earlier than usual, a process that will be repeated next week in Martinsville. After that, Darby said that he expects the inspection process at the remaining 14 COT races this season to begin on the Friday before the race, as normally is the case.

"The race teams have done an outstanding job on preparing these cars for this race," said Darby, director of competition for the Nextel Cup Series. "Other than some very small and totally expected conversations and issues, everything has gone very well."

Darby pointed out that despite all the public and private debate regarding the COT's much-anticipated debut, many of the crew members who actually get the cars ready for race day were far from intimate with the machine until this week.

"Part of the reason we knew we had to lay the format out [Thursday] the way we did, adding the extra time, is because we've been racing since Daytona in February," Darby said. "So the teams and the crew members that are here with these cars are the guys who week in and week out come to the racetrack and race the cars. The majority of all of these crew members have probably never laid a hand on these cars until this weekend when they got here to the racetrack.

"It's all been done with team engineers and development crews and stuff like that. So the whole project takes a whole new outlook now -- because this is part of an actual event and it's real. Some shops are really good with conversation in meetings as far as transferring information from the engineers to the race crews, and back and forth -- and some aren't. Each individual team is different. So with each individual team, we need to take the time and do due diligence and walk through all the explanations and everything -- even though we probably had the same explanation a hundred times previously. But it might not have been to the actual guys who are here now working on these cars." (Continued)