Notes: Elliott's ability in 21 car wows Wood Brothers (cont'd)

Penske/Waltrip merger not imminent
Representatives from Penske Racing and Michael Waltrip Racing on Saturday disallowed rumors of an impending merger between the two organizations, which currently field Dodges and Toyotas, respectively, in a variety of NASCAR series.

"I heard about it for the first time [Friday]," said Ty Norris, Michael Waltrip Racing's general manager. "I wish he would come and talk to us."

Wally McCarty, Penske Racing's marketing director, was just as succinct.

"We're racing Dodges through the end of next season, and right now we're most concerned about winning races for Dodge -- we have to be," McCarty said. "We have a beautiful new facility and so does [Waltrip]. There's no 'win' there.

"I don't know where people come up with these things. Roger [Penske] sells nearly every car make made in the world, and he has great relationships with all of them. We race Dodges, Hondas and Porsches out of the same shop, and we have great relationships with all of them.

"Would we race Toyotas at some point? When it's appropriate, we might talk about it, and if it's right, we might do that [but] right now [Waltrip] has three teams and we have two -- and you can only have four [total] so it doesn't make sense."

McCarty said Penske was considering a third team "depending on what [Penske IndyCar Series driver] Sam Hornish decides to do," over the next year or two.

P.J. stands in for Robby Gordon
Robby Gordon qualified 34th for the Autism Speaks 400 on Friday at Dover, then traveled to Mexico to compete in Saturday's Baja 500 Score off-road event. California buddy P.J. Jones made his Car of Tomorrow debut in practice Saturday, but was limited by an engine failure, making 19 laps in the morning practice and only eight in the afternoon.

"This was the first time I've driven a COT on an oval, though I've tested on a road course for a couple teams," Jones said. "It was a little bit different and I didn't get a whole lot of laps, anyways.

"I haven't been to Dover in a while, but I think that everyone's about the same [with the COT] and the more that we keep working on them, we'll get them driving better and better."

Gordon expected to be back late Saturday evening or Sunday morning, in time for the scheduled race start.

Professor Rudd 'travels'
Ricky Rudd, on the eve of his sixth Car of Tomorrow race, gave an eloquent explanation Saturday at Dover of the biggest issue most people have with the COT:

"It's not a car issue," said Rudd, who'll start 40th. "The big problem that we struggle with -- and it's either you hit it or you don't -- is the available travel we have. The Car of Tomorrow, the air dam only has so much clearance they limit you to, whether it's three inches or four inches -- but that's all the available travel you have, which is about half of what we normally deal with.

"So when you go down the straightaway and then go into these large banks, that soaks up a lot of travel right there. So everybody is stopping their car with a coil-bind situation, [where] basically the spring goes solid and that stops that front air dam from hitting the racetrack.

"You've got to do something because you can't just drive in there [because] when the front air dam touches the racetrack your car goes all to pieces. You'll hit so hard enough, you'll hit the fence because it goes in and it slides -- like your front tires aren't touching the ground when you're on the front air dam.

"You need to get better with your computer modeling program that you've got, your pull-down fixtures that you've got at the shop where you pull the car down to what you think it's going to travel. It puts a lot more stress on the cars that are coming to the racetrack, being able to deal with that available travel we have.

"And that's what we've missed here. We missed it. We were on the air dam, and then we weren't on the air dam. That's a very sensitive area to be able to stop the car. Stopping it is not a problem; the problem is getting it to soak up that energy nice and progressively instead of spiking it.

"If it spikes, the car's no good. If it loads up nice and evenly and you time your left-front stop with your right-front stop, the car goes around the corners. If you miss it, it's a nightmare. And that's what we've been fighting.

"It becomes a very technical procedure now, where it becomes a science project."