Some teams upset with COT's brake system setup

MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- Setups appeared to be critical to brake life and performance and the presence or absence of brake heat-related issues Sunday at Martinsville Speedway.

Not surprisingly, the cars that finished at the front, the Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolets of Goody's Cool Orange 500 winner Jimmie Johnson and runner-up Jeff Gordon and the Joe Gibbs Racing Chevy of third-place Denny Hamlin were stopping fine at the end of 500 grueling laps on the half-mile bullring.

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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But behind them, there were enough issues in brake packages to prove the ongoing development and fine-tuning of the Car of Tomorrow, which Sunday was raced for only the second time, will continue for quite some time.

"We ran the same brake package that we typically would run here in the front," winning crew chief Chad Knaus said. "We did run a larger package in the rear, to try to slow the car down just a little bit more with the rear brake.

"And then we just made sure that Jimmie was easy on them. Starting 20th, we had a long way to go, and we had to be patient because it would have been easy for him to go out there and burn the brakes off trying to get to the front real quick -- but fortunately enough we didn't."

Hamlin's crew chief, Mike Ford, wasn't satisfied, saying, "You always want to win," but said his car's brake issues were nil.

"We didn't have any brake issues all day long -- the brakes were good," Ford said. "We didn't seem to have any brake issues and usually Denny is real sensitive to that, so if we had an issue, he would have said something right up front.

"We didn't see any excessive temperature or [brake] dust [in the wheels Sunday], and there were no complaints [from Hamlin] about the peddle. Everything seemed to be good [because] that's one thing we really work with, is to stay off the brakes.

"I know he was off the brake [Sunday] -- he used more in practice [Saturday]. And that's one thing, if you can be off the brake, you ought to be. That was one of the things we lacked last year, but Denny's gotten better about taking care of his equipment and if we had an issue, I know I would have heard about it."

A red flag to dry the racetrack after a brief flurry of rain allowed brakes to cool. That was only a plus for the teams that needed it.

"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.

"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."