NASCAR's concern over safety foam still burns (cont'd)

One interested onlooker was Robbie Reiser, Kenseth's crew chief. His driver competed last weekend at Bristol with a basketball-sized hole burned into the side foam of his No. 17 car, and felt ill all week. NASCAR told Reiser that his team had installed the foam improperly, a charge the crew chief refutes.

Not that he'd talk about his foam incident.

Lap-by-Lap

For every move Jeff Gordon made, Jimmie Johnson countered in a thrilling finish at Martinsville. But before that, the first 499 laps had to play out.

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"NASCAR said we didn't have one," Reiser said when asked if the damage to Harvick's car Sunday was similar to what Kenseth's car suffered last week. "We put it in wrong. I'm not getting involved. I'll end up paying the price for it."

Darby checked out all three Richard Childress Racing cars after the event, and said Harvick's was the only one with a problem. The vehicles of teammates Clint Bowyer and Jeff Burton, he said, were cool enough to touch.

"Todd mentioned one thing that he noticed his car was doing, as it was going into the corner it was bellowing out a big ol' flame ball," Darby said. "They had taken the extra steps to put up a heat baffle, and even some Nomex-like material to help insulate it. For whatever reason, they had seen some moderate melting on the 29 in testing, and tried to insulate it well. Why it's individualized to one car on the team, I don't have an answer for that yet. But obviously, what we need to do is to get some more free air moving underneath the foam to keep it cool or to keep the heat waves out."

That could entail something as simple as cutting small louvers into the rocker panel to keep air moving beneath the foam. NASCAR has three weeks to work on the problem before the series heads for the 1-mile oval in Phoenix, the first time the COT will venture off a short track.

"It's not an incurable problem, by any means," Darby said. "It's something we're going to have to work on pretty hard, pretty quick."

One COT feature, the matched bumpers, came into play at the end of the Martinsville race and prevented runner-up Jeff Gordon from pulling the bump-and-run move on eventual winner Jimmie Johnson in the final laps. On the old car, the front bumper was lower than the rear, allowing the driver in second place to nose an opponent out of the way.

Now, that move is much more difficult to execute. And Johnson was just fine with it.

"I think it's a good thing," he said after his third victory this season. "The guy behind you can't just go in there and knock him out of the way. You've actually got to drive the car past him."

Just as NASCAR had hoped.

"The thing that's really impressing me is that with the bumpers being lined up, cars aren't spinning each other out when there is nose-to-tail contact," said Brett Bodine, NASCAR's director of cost management. "That's what the whole bumper design was about."

Something else was evident Sunday as well: the COT seems to be harder to handle in traffic, at least on a short track like Martinsville. Numerous times in the Goody's Cool Orange 500, drivers like Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Denny Hamlin pulled away when leading on restarts, and built wide margins on the rest of the field. Put those same drivers in traffic, and they struggled to find as much speed.

Crew chief Chad Knaus "used amazing pit strategy to get us track position or get us up front, and once we were up front, I picked up a lot of time," Johnson said. "The guys who were leading like Junior, who had to come trough traffic, just didn't have the speed. One reason is, it's just really tough to pass here. But it does seem like you lose a little bit of front grip in traffic as you're racing people. Clean air does help these cars out a lot."

Sunday delivered arguably a better race than the COT's debut at Bristol, with more side-by-side action and drivers leaning on one another for position. But to Gordon, none of that really matters. The bigger tracks, he said, will be the true barometer of the Car of Tomorrow's potential.

"We're wasting out time trying to even comment on the Car of Tomorrow at Martinsville and Bristol," he said. "You can hardly tell anything about this car right now. ... Yeah, it was a little bit harder to pass. Yeah, I couldn't drive in as deep. But these are all the things you expect with this car. We've just got to get used to it."