Time to see if COT will take to the heavy air in Phoenix

It's all about the air, the warm stuff that blows out of the Sonoran Desert and settles over the Valley of the Sun. It's dry, hot, and this time of year, full of pollen from blooming ash and olive trees. And it presents the next challenge for NASCAR's Car of Tomorrow, which competes at Phoenix International Raceway on Saturday night.

After a pair of opening races on short tracks, the COT makes its first foray onto a larger speedway when the Nextel Cup Series rolls into the 1-mile oval in Avondale, Ariz. After weeks spent fretting over brakes, damage, exhaust systems and protective foam with a strange propensity to melt, the focus now turns to the air wafting down from the Estrella Mountains, and how the boxier vehicles will handle within it.

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Phoenix poses the first real trial of the COT's aerodynamics, something only tangentially tested on the half-mile circuits at Bristol and Martinsville. And it should provide a glimpse of how the vehicle will fare on even bigger tracks, slated for the later stages of the COT's rollout.

"Bristol and Martinsville were good tracks for this car to be introduced," said points leader Jeff Gordon. "They're short tracks, and aerodynamics don't play much of a role in the handling of the car. It allowed us to understand the inspection process a little bit better, and gave us a chance to learn what areas we can work on to gain mechanical grip. I think this race will give us a much better idea of where we are with the Car of Tomorrow. It's a lot faster track, where aerodynamics are much more of a factor."

Bristol and Martinsville offered what may prove to be an inauspicious preview. Even on the short tracks, it was evident that drivers were having a more difficult time passing one another -- no surprise on the smaller circuits, but apparently exacerbated by the new car's aerodynamics. Out front, in clean air, the car seemed to soar. In traffic, it was another story.

And two of the most hated words in Nextel Cup racing -- aero push -- began getting tossed around again.

"The biggest concern for me is going to be how aero tight we're going to be, how hard passing is going to be," Denny Hamlin said. "We know from testing at Richmond that you can't even get close to anybody before it pushes. You can be three-tenths [of a second] faster, and all of the sudden you're three-tenths slower. It's a concern for us, but we've just got to work through it."

Teams tested the COT on the .75-mile track at Richmond during the off week following the Martinsville race. Some team will take setups from that test into the Phoenix event, despite the aerodynamic differences the two facilities present. Phoenix native J.J. Yeley believes the timing of the Saturday night race will give drivers more grip to work with than they had in the first two COT events.

"I think the fans are going to enjoy it," he said. "Especially being a night race, I think the speeds are going to be down a little bit. To me, there's nothing wrong with the cars. They're a little bit slower. The more time teams have to spend with these cars, the faster they make them. I think the cars; really their potential is going to be up to Goodyear. If Goodyear starts bringing back softer tires because the cars don't handle as well or go as fast, you'll see faster speeds and the racing will be just as good."

Jeff Burton, who won last weekend at Texas with the conventional car, took part in a COT tire test at Phoenix and told Richard Childress Racing teammate Kevin Harvick that the new car drove better than the one he raced there last year. But that could change once the car gets in traffic.

"Bristol and Martinsville are so short that, mechanically, the [COT] wasn't too terribly different from our other cars and where we were used to," Casey Mears said. "But when we get to a place like Phoenix where we actually start seeing some speed, that's when the downforce of these cars is going to start coming into effect. The downforce on the [COT] is a lot different than on the Monte Carlo. And because Phoenix is a combination of mechanics and aerodynamics, we'll get a chance to see how these cars work in traffic."

Phoenix will also mark the first COT race since NASCAR made design changes in an attempt to prevent the right-side foam from melting which plagued several drivers at Bristol and Harvick and Martinsville. NASCAR issued a technical bulletin prior to this week's event mandating that the foam, meant to absorb energy in an accident, be installed higher on the right side to provide more airflow between it and the exhaust pipes.

Proximity to the exhaust pipes, which typically run hotter on short tracks, was causing that foam to melt or smolder. At Martinsville, the smoldering foam burned a small hole in the interior right side of Harvick's car, leading the driver to say that the situation was turning into a "joke."

But last week at Texas, Harvick -- who swept both races at Phoenix last season -- tempered his comments. "I've been in cars on fire in a lot worse condition than that one was," he said. "It was no big deal, just another racecar."