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

"It gave us no indication of that. Something might have been rubbing or something might have broke somewhere in the system."

Biffle said he almost wadded up his No. 16 Roush Racing Ford when he had a right-rear brake failure. He ultimately finished 32nd.

"Yeah, I had an issue with my brakes, and I think there were about six or eight of us that did," Biffle said. "Everybody's having little issues, but we all had issues with the same product, the AP brake calipers.

"I'd have to verify that, but it sounds there were like six more guys that had the same brake system we did, and they had a rear brake failure, and that's unfortunate. When it happens, all the brake fluid's gone, the pedal just goes to the floor and it doesn't stop at all.

"It's so dangerous, so I tried to crank all the brake to the front, tried to stay out of everybody's way until the caution came out and we could come in and work on it. We totally unhooked the right-rear brake caliper because it had completely failed -- the seal's burned out of it.

"I think [Truex], [Johnny Sauter], [Jeff Green] and I don't know how many more all had the same brakes and the same thing happened."

Green was particularly frustrated after a seventh-place finish in the COT debut at Bristol.

"The only way I can describe it is frustrated [because] we had a top-10 car, no doubt," Green said. "The brakes started getting mushy pretty early on. We weren't even to halfway before the [brake] pedal was going all the way to the floor.

"We got in a long green-flag run situation, the brakes got really hot, and that was it. We lost something like 10 spots in about 20 laps, went a lap down, and that was all she wrote."

"I'm very upset at how things turned out," said Harold Holly, crew chief for Jeff Green's No. 66 Chevy. "With this new car, we've obviously got some work to do on the brakes. We won't have this problem again."

Sauter's day was equally flawed.

"I don't know what happened [but] they went away," Sauter said of his brakes. "And if I knew why, I'd tell you. I know it melted the o-rings out of the caliper. This place is tough on brakes, but our problem started so early that we've obviously got a problem on our end.

"I wasn't using any more brake than usual. This is a heavy-braking track, but we shouldn't have had that problem as early as we did."

Sauter's crew chief, Bootie Barker, was adamant that his team had to straighten out its cooling issue, saying the problem was not with his car's AP brakes.

"We're not sure what it was, but we're pretty sure we did something wrong in our cooling package, from the shop," Barker said. "So Johnny just had to ride around for 450 laps, more or less -- and that's way too early for that to happen.

"The brakes are great -- the best thing out here -- and that's not the issue. It's the cooling and it's all us [figuring it out]. It's an individual team setup problem that caused a failure, but it wasn't a brake failure, it was a cooling issue and we boiled all the fluid out."

"Obviously, the brakes are hot," Biffle said. "We've got all the cooling NASCAR allows us to the brakes currently, so we don't know what else we can do [because] we've got the maximum amount of hoses, the maximum amount of fans.

"We've got what we've got and it's not good enough, so we'll have to look at it."

Eury said a lot more development work was needed on the new car.

"We're looking at a brand-new car, we're not really sure how the air's going around there, and how much CFM [cubic feet for minute] you've got coming through the brake ducts," Eury said. "We actually caught where we were burning up an inner bearing in a hub, [Sunday] morning in our pre-race [inspection].

"We've never seen that before, and that is nothing more than brake-rotor heat, cooking the bearings. So there are some issues with this car. Some of us were lucky [Sunday] to be able to not have any problems and some of us were unfortunate. So we've just got to kind of find the details."

Eury said he and Manion were discussing if the cooling systems were the same and said "they are -- they were identical. So we've really got to go back and compare [brake] pads, and how his car was driving.

"If my car had been tight, I might have had the same failure. I don't know. We'll sit down Monday in our little meeting and compare notes."

Knaus said the cooling issue was pretty cut-and-dried and said his team was unable to do anything extraordinary to help its brake cooling, though it also never became an issue.

"NASCAR mandates the duct that goes into the nose -- the fascia," Knaus said. "And the spindle ducts are all relatively the same so we really didn't have anything we could do, special."