Exhibit takes fan through stock-car history to COT

CONCORD, N.C. -- Even Darrell Waltrip, one of the earliest and most vocal critics of NASCAR's Car of Tomorrow, is beginning to come around.

As Waltrip guided a group of fans and media through a stock-car exhibit in a large tent outside Lowe's Motor Speedway on Saturday, it was part a walk down memory lane and part a peek into the future.

Stock-car exhibit

Watch highlights of NASCAR's Back to the Future stock-car exhibit at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

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Waltrip stopped first at a car he used to drive -- the No. 88 Chevrolet Monte Carlo sponsored by Gatorade that he drove in NASCAR's Cup Series in 1977. Brett Bodine, NASCAR's director of cost research, gasped when he saw it.

"How about that hood? You could play a basketball game on that thing," Bodine joked.

Waltrip seemed genuinely happy to see an old friend, and he wasn't talking about Bodine.

"I only came over here because I heard my girlfriend was here," said Waltrip, grinning. "We nicknamed her 'Bertha.' Yeah, it's big and it's ugly. But it was a well-handling car."

Of course, a few minutes later Waltrip said that driving ol' Bertha was like driving a dump truck. But then, Waltrip has been known to flip-flop on some issues -- like the Car of Tomorrow. The larger point he was trying to make was that the new COT is more like Bertha than might first meet the naked eye.

Bertha was big and wide and spacious, and even had an honest-to-goodness chrome bumper. In other words, it looks nothing like the Car of Tomorrow. But what Bertha and the other older cars that are on display in the exhibit (including a 1985 Chevy Monte Carlo driven by Terry Labonte and a 1972 Dodge Charger driven by Richard Petty) have in common with NASCAR's newest car is that it isn't like what Waltrip called "the twisted sister" current cars.

Waltrip illustrated how today's current cars have been manipulated to the point that the nose is off-center and other aspects of the car are all out of whack in a desperate effort to get them to stick to the racetracks and go faster. He said that he has come to realize NASCAR needed to do something to bring the car it was going to run in its top series back in line with the original intended spirit of the sport -- driving stock cars that are safer and are built mostly from parts that can be mass produced.

Pointing first at a Car of Tomorrow and then back at a current car, Waltrip said, "They are not going to allow them to screw up this car like that car."

Then Waltrip gestured again toward the COT that was on display, and implored doubting fans in attendance to give it some time before giving up on it. He advised drivers and others within the sport who have criticized it to do the same.

"Like this car or not, it's correcting a lot of issues," Waltrip said. "Even though I haven't been a big fan of this car, I'm learning to like it. It's going to take some getting used to. I've got to say that it's not the prettiest thing I've ever seen -- but they all look pretty in Victory Lane."

Bodine, a former car owner himself, echoed Waltrip's contention that the current car has been manipulated to the point where it couldn't be salvaged as the car of NASCAR's future. It simply was going to cost car owners way too much money to keep going down the road in that vehicle, and he contends that it would have driven some lesser-funded teams out of the sport altogether.

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"Those cars being manipulated cost car owners a lot of money. Trust me, I was one of those guys writing all the checks for wind-tunnel development and replacing bodies that never made the racetrack, just because we needed to twist it and move it a little bit more to try to make it better," Bodine said. "Through that process, it never stopped developing. And it made it very hard for a lesser-funded team to stay caught up -- because the only way you could see or know what to do with your car was to go to the racetrack and see who was running well and try to go back and copy that.

"With the Car of Tomorrow, you go to the track and you know that all the cars are the same aerodynamically. The only thing different is the length of the front splitter, or the wing angle, or the choice of end plates ... you can still tune your car aerodynamically, but there is no need to manipulate the shape of the body and go through those development costs for every single race. This will truly lessen the need to take cars to the wind tunnel non-stop."

Gary Nelson, the former vice president of NASCAR's Research and Development Center who began the COT project, also was on hand and added: "Everything for the Car of Tomorrow was taken from lessons learned from cars of the past."

Nelson said the most important improvement is in all the safety features added, but also said that over time he expects the average cost of producing racecars to plummet by as much as 75 percent for race teams -- also because of the switch to the COT, as parts that previously had to be produced by hand by each shop become replaced by ones mass produced and then distributed by NASCAR.

Bodine said it currently costs car owners roughly $100,000 to produce a short-track racecar, and twice that much for owners to produce racecars that compete at superspeedways such as Daytona and Talladega. He said Nelson's cost-cutting estimate is right on target and will benefit all teams, big and small.

"I think it's very realistic. If you add the entire cost of a fleet of cars to compete in a series, versus the entire fleet that it's going to take with the Car of Tomorrow, number one, the car is going to cost less right out of the box and, number two, you're going to need less of those cars in numbers. That's where the 75 percent figure comes from," Bodine said.

"If you look at the 29 car [driven by Kevin Harvick for Richard Childress Racing], they've raced one car in all of the Car of Tomorrow races. No one would even think of doing that with the current car -- let alone a top team. People were thinking it would be the lesser-funded teams taking advantage of it, but this is a top-10 race team that did that. I don't think anybody has yet understood what that means to the entire program. It's really working."

Just last week, NASCAR announced it was going to run races with the COT full-time in 2008 -- one year earlier than initially scheduled. Five of this season's first 11 races have been run in COT machines, and Bodine said that what everyone has learned is that, while it remains a work in progress in many shops, it is something on which progress can and will be made.

Even Waltrip now appears to agree that the COT's time has arrived.

"He was a big critic," Bodine said. "But I think as the car develops with each team, as crew chiefs get used to working on it and adjusting it and the driver gets used to what those adjustments do and how he has to adjust his driving style to fit those changes, I think guys will quit complaining about it. The other thing that I truly think will happen is that guys will quit complaining about it because if you're not willing to accept it, you might be a guy who can't get the job done in the Car of Tomorrow. It's kind of like, you'd better learn to like it because that's what you're gonna race. And I'm sure the owners are getting tired of hearing [all the complaining]."