Cautions of Today make it hard on Car of Tomorrow

From a fan's point of view, Sunday's Subway 500 looked like a classic Martinsville race. Lots of two-wide racing, some ill-advised three-wide racing and the usual amount of bumping and banging, resulting in a record-breaking number of cautions.

But on closer inspection, most of the two-wide racing involved the leaders trying to maneuver around lapped traffic and a lot of the contact came as a result of the inability to find enough open space to make a clean pass. That got worse as the day progressed and the top lane lost grip.

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There were 12 lead changes among seven drivers, but only four of those came on the track -- with eventual winner Jimmie Johnson being responsible for two of them. It was Johnson's pass of teammate Jeff Gordon on Lap 456 that allowed him to hold the top spot the rest of the way.

It's obvious that the Car of Tomorrow is still a work in progress, especially from the driver's perspective.

Gordon said track position was paramount all day, especially since it was so difficult to gain ground in between the numerous cautions. He led the first 108 laps before pit strategy shuffled the running order.

"I'm still not a fan of this car," he said. "If you put me back in 26th or whatever with one of the best cars and it's everything I can do to pass the 25th-place car. And to me, there's a problem. And if we can't pass at Martinsville, how are we going to pass at other tracks?

"I just think that either we've got to do something to the track or we still need to make some adjustments to this car. But the only thing that got me where I was, was the fact that we had a good car and we just got track position and pit strategy saved the day for us."

Dale Earnhardt Jr. rooted Juan Montoya out of the way on Lap 225 to take the lead, something that happened several times Sunday. Some of that may be attributed to the inherent toughness of the COT design.

"I saw a lot of roughness, I was part of a lot of roughness, I was a cause of some of it," Junior said. "But my crew chief said I wasn't sticking out like a sore thumb, that I was not different than anyone else when it came to being rough. These new cars are pretty tough and they can handle.

"You can drive right in there with these cars, you don't even worry about it. You just drive right in the side of them if they make you mad. This thing won't knock the tow out of it or anything; I beat mine off the wall, off other cars and it still drove great."

Ryan Newman gained track position by taking only two tires on his last pit stop. Because of the numerous restarts, it was difficult for the lead-lap cars to clear lapped traffic and race each other, especially with the slower cars in the preferred line.

"It really seemed like the desired line was the bottom line," Newman said. "You could work the outside just a little bit but it seemed like the distance around was kinda out of the way. That is why we saw so much bunched up racing on restarts.

"The lap-down cars had the desired line on the inside. The guys on the outside had to work really hard to get around those lap-down cars. I wouldn't say the racing was great but it was pretty much the same as the first race."

With so few long green-flag runs, Matt Kenseth said there was little advantage in having fresher tires.

"When you get all of those short runs and everybody starts wrecking, you only run eight or nine laps at a time," Kenseth said. "And with runs like that, four tires wasn't gonna pass you."

Gordon agreed that long runs might have helped separate the field and make for better racing, but no one had the chance to find out.

"My car just really didn't turn very good getting in and was real loose off on the short runs," Gordon said. "And that's how it was on every run, basically. But when we had the longer runs it came to us."

Gordon said one thing's for certain: There's still not enough ability to adjust the new chassis to changing conditions.

"With this car, once you set the car up, you can't do anything to it," Gordon said. "There is just hardly anything you can do to it, other than air pressure, that affects this car. So, you're pretty much stuck with it.

"It's not that we didn't know it was like that. There just wasn't anything we could do about it. We were just keeping our fingers crossed that we would have more green-flag runs."

But in order to have longer green-flag runs, you have to have the ability to pass without having to bump your way by.

And there's the rub.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.