Some teams upset with COT's brake system setup (cont'd)

"We've had no brake issues at all," veteran Ricky Rudd's crew chief, Butch Hylton, said during the red flag, before his driver went on to finish 13th in the No. 88 Ford, their best finish of the season. "We had to turn the blowers off about 140 laps ago because we've got an alternator going bad, but we've been watching them and they're not red at all.

"I think it's all about chassis setups. Stevie's [Letarte, Jeff Gordon's crew chief] car is driving so good, [Gordon] ain't using the brakes. And our car is OK, so [Rudd] is not having to use the brakes much.

"That's kind of the key here. If it drives good, you don't need brakes."

"And you've got two veteran drivers, Ricky Rudd and Jeff Gordon, and they're going to make brakes go until the end," Letarte said. "They know what it takes, and I think the younger guys are the ones that are going to have a bit of trouble [because] they don't know when to pace themselves.

"You can have brake problems, but you've just got to have a good car, get lucky and pace yourself."

Kurt Busch said repeated four-tire stops hurt his No. 2 Dodge the most, but he added that "my brake rotors glazed over a little bit, so we can do a little better job cooling the brakes and we'll see what the future leads us to."

The divergence of the two Dale Earnhardt Inc. cars in the race had their crew chiefs, Tony Eury Jr. for fifth place Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s No. 8 Chevrolet and Kevin Manion for Martin Truex Jr.'s No. 1 Chevy, stage an impromptu meeting in the middle of the garage to discuss the subject.

After the bitter disappointment of leading two of three practices, only to run out of brakes and finish 29th, four laps down, Manion was still able to share a laugh with Eury.

"Brakes?" Manion said. "His worked and mine didn't."

"That's what we're doing," Eury said. "We're comparing notes to find out what happened."

"We weren't the only one with a brake problem, but our rotors definitely looked hotter than most, earlier than anybody," Manion said. "But I warned [Truex] and he made it sound like he wasn't using no brakes.

"So we've got to look at our cooling package. [NASCAR] allowed us to put a little wicker on there this morning [to help the cooling]. But we had a right-rear failure, first -- and I did hear of two or three other cars that had the same package and had the same failure.

"The seal left the puck and the fluid come out and caught fire. That's how we knew it was the right rear, because it was on fire. So we've just got to figure them out."

Even though Truex fell back in the early stages of the race, he didn't lose his first lap until less than 100 laps remained.

"I don't know how [Truex's] car was handling, but any time your car is handling really good, [you won't use much brake]," Eury said. "We were loose most of the day, so [Earnhardt] was really not using that much brake, at all."

Earnhardt was skeptical of his brakes' ability to last, during Happy Hour on Saturday, when he was the fastest car. During a red flag for rain near the end of the race he displayed a lot more optimism.

"I don't have any issues -- I get can down in the corner and get off the corner," Earnhardt said. "I've got a little bit of vibration in the brakes but that's typical here. I was running the car really, really hard and probably heating the brakes up and working them up a little bit, but the car is great."

That was not what a number of other teams experienced, and the worst-case scenario was Bobby Labonte's, which occurred only 39 laps into the race.

"I went down into Turn 1 and hit the brakes and they went all the way to the floor [so] something had to go wrong," Labonte said of the problem that sounded identical to Greg Biffle's and Johnny Sauter's, though neither of them crashed. "We had to break something. We didn't run long enough to have a brake problem, but we ran long enough for the brakes to have a problem. (Continued)