Ryan Newman was in Phoenix doing hospitality, that weekly routine of handshakes and question-and-answer sessions, when he finally grasped what troubled him most about the Car of Tomorrow. Forget the rear wing, the front splitter, the handling issues that sometimes make it difficult to pass. For this racecar driver, it came down to a more basic element -- NASCAR's new generation vehicle was forcing him to slow down, something that ran counter to his every instinct behind the wheel.

"I think the biggest disappointment with the new car compared to the old car is just pure performance, the fact that the car is a half-second slower," Newman said. "When we go to test we anticipate going faster each time we go there, whether it's Kentucky or Nashville or each racetrack we go to.

"For instance: Atlanta the last test, it's nice to be able to come back and go faster. You take a brand new car, or a brand new designed car and take it to the racetrack, and it at minimum is a half-second slower. It's difficult to say, 'Man this thing really drives good,' or, 'Man, this thing just feels that much better.' The Car of Tomorrow, which is going to be here all year next year, that's going to be our baseline as we go on. We kind of have to put all of those thoughts and all of those feelings behind us."

Because like or not, the Car of Tomorrow becomes reality for every Sprint Cup event as the calendar turns to the 2008 season, which opens with testing at Daytona International Speedway on Jan. 7. It's no longer the COT, but the standard NASCAR chassis, the car of today. But don't let that full-time implementation fool you -- according to the men who drive it and the crew chiefs who work on it every day, this is still very much a work in progress. There are still things they don't know about it, still technical limits they're trying to define, still places like Daytona and 1.5-mile intermediate tracks where it has yet to compete.

There's no more alternating between old car and new, that incredibly expensive and time-consuming two-step that teams were forced to dance last season. Now the changeover to a singular vehicle -- which owner Ray Evernham estimates cost his team $8 million -- is complete. The original three-year phase-in planned by NASCAR was scrapped at the behest of big teams, which didn't want to run multiple platforms any longer than they had to, and small ones, which saw the COT as a tool for leveling the playing field. So now the new car is here, for all 36 events. Even if teams are still trying to figure out what exactly they're dealing with.

"There's a lot we still don't know," Jeff Burton said. "Sometimes when you get a little bit of information, that's more deadly than having none. Each team is in a different situation. If you look ay where Hendrick is, I think they probably feel pretty good about themselves. If you look at where Gibbs is, I think they probably feel pretty good about themselves. There are some other teams that are kind of teetering. Again, a little bit of information is sometimes worse than none, and we're still in the process of gathering enough information to truly understand what we've got our hands on." (Continued)