Not surprisingly, throughout the first season in which NASCAR fully employed its "new car," known up to 2008 as the "Car of Tomorrow" in the Cup Series, plusses and minuses emerged.

Without a doubt, the biggest plus was the car's safety aspects. After 36 races and brutal accidents endured without injury by Jeff Gordon at Las Vegas, Michael McDowell at Texas and Denny Hamlin at Talladega, among others; the car's safety is so taken for granted it's virtually unmentioned by anyone when discussing the car's impact on the sport, unless they're specifically asked.

"Obviously, the biggest positive of this car is the safety changes that were made to the car to protect the drivers," said Doug Duchardt, vice president of development for Hendrick Motorsports, Gordon's team. "The structure of the chassis has been solid."

"Let's not lose sight that [safety] is the most important part of this program," said NASCAR director of cost research Brett Bodine, who's been the prime mover in the new car program since its 2004 inception. "Unfortunately for some folks, we've proven a couple times what it's improved, safety-wise, but that's why this program is in place, to build a safer race car for our competitors, and I think we've achieved that, to this point.

New car 101

• The new car
• Inside the cockpit
• A new era
• More competition
• Driver safety
• Cost management

"But every day we're looking at safety and making improvements and trying to be better in that area, but certainly it's met our goals of improved safety."

But there are plenty of other comparisons to draw from 2007, when the new car was used in 16 of 36 races, to 2008, when it was used everywhere.

It was hoped that the new car would improve competition. That remains the proverbial work in progress, as a selective statistical analysis shows the old and new cars are competitively close; though acceptance from fans has come slowly.

It was hoped the new car would save team owners money, but only time will tell on that score, as well. A reasonable cross-section of opinions from a number of race teams' upper management found some optimism for an eventual cost reduction, but agreed it would take at least a few years to achieve any savings.

While initially developing the new car was understood to be a significant expense, the idea of some NASCAR officials was that it would be a "one size fits all" creation that eventually would cut the size of teams' fleets of cars, which had come to be custom-built for virtually every race track on the schedule.

Observers say some teams have bought into that concept better than others, but the bottom line is, competition drives race teams, and if keeping up means custom building, that's what teams will do.

One thing that's certain is the process of building these cars, and then getting them approved and registered into NASCAR's computer chip-based "system" -- which is a creation of the new car era -- has become a much more efficient and streamlined process than it was nearly two years ago, being cut in half according to some participants.

But to some degree, the flip side of the form-fitting template system and the accompanying chassis-certification process is that getting damaged cars back into service isn't as quick a process as it was with the former "standard car" -- even if teams decide to go that route -- versus converting a wrecked car into a show car or spare parts.

In the interest of stability, to enable continued and hopefully positive development of a known quantity and to control costs as much as possible, NASCAR has told teams no significant rule changes will be made to the new car for the 2009 season, a decision that was greeted positively by a group that thrives on finding loopholes, gray areas and advantages over the competition through massaging miniscule areas of its cars.

But even as it accepted that, those in the Cup garage were already looking to the horizon for possible changes.

Tale of the tape

Very few statistical analyses can ever give a true picture of anything, and so it goes when comparing the new car to the standard car, which was used for the final time at Homestead in November 2007 and in 19 other Cup races before that last season, ending an ever-developing cycle of about 20 years.

Statistics comparing six races in the middle of this season against the same events in 2007 in which the standard car was used are as inconclusive as statistics usually are; with the most graphic example being how a scintillating finish can erase the memory of a fairly boring race.

The comparison was done at Indianapolis, the Pocono summer race, Michigan in August, California's Labor Day event, Kansas and Texas in November.

Across the board, the new car was slower than the previous, highly-developed standard version when qualifying was compared at the six tracks. With the exception of Michigan, which had less than a tenth of a second difference in favor of the older car, every other venue's old car time ranged from .438 seconds faster at California to .688 seconds quicker at Texas.

“

The more we race it, the more our competitors work with it and the more they define the areas that they need to work on themselves. It's all about refining the areas that are most going to improve your performance, and all the teams are going through that.

”

-- BRETT BODINE

Developing a tire that's more appropriate for the car's higher center of gravity and altered weight distribution might be the greatest reason for the speed disparity, but teams' comfort level with the car may increase its competition level.

"Goodyear has had more and more tire tests, and they're tuning their tire to what this car needs, because they're learning about it just like the race teams are," Bodine said. "That aspect of the process is definitely getting better."

Lead changes didn't vary greatly between the two cars. In two of the six races, the older car created more lead changes, by about the same margin at Texas (27-16) and California (30-20). Races at Kansas (16) and Michigan (18) produced the same number of changes and Pocono's (25-17) and Indy's (26-14) 2008 events favored the new car.

The new car was eliminated by fewer accidents than the standard car, 7-21; and had a better ratio of DNFs per race, 3.3-6.1. The older car averaged 9.8 cautions per the six races, while the new car raced with an average of 7.5 yellows. In all but two races, California (22-17) and Indy (36-21), the older car had a higher number of cars finishing on the lead lap per race, while the average per race was nearly identical.

In perhaps the most compelling stat indicating a "draw," computing green flag passes by the top-three finishers was a three-three tie in races; though the older car averaged 182.7 green flag passes by the top three to 169.8 by the new car.

"The competition is getting better for a lot of reasons," Bodine said. "First is track time. The more we race it, the more our competitors work with it and the more they define the areas that they need to work on themselves. It's all about refining the areas that are most going to improve your performance, and all the teams are going through that."

"As far as on-track competition, I'd look at NASCAR as the source, because obviously it's their product and they want to make sure it's as good as possible," Duchardt said. "I know the drivers have opinions on that and they're in the cars so they may have a better opinion."

"This [new] car, there's a smaller window to get it perfect," 2008 championship runner-up Carl Edwards said. "And I know that it's not always the driver, it's how your crew chief sets the thing up and how you guys relate during practice and things like that, and I think that's just as important as how you drive it."

Edwards did cite one aspect of the new car that affected not only competition but also the drivers' view of it.

"Every racer all around the country -- racing at a local dirt track, wherever -- there's nothing worse than not knowing if it's a guy's car that's beating you or if it's that driver," Edwards said. "I think NASCAR has done a good job of making these cars -- putting you in such a tight box that you really feel like you're racing crew chief to crew chief, driver to driver. It's good competition.

"It does make it hard to pass at some of the tracks because so many guys are the same speed. But man, it's sure cool to know that you've got a really good chance -- you're not going to get beat by some guy's magical fender or something."

Racing = Spending

There's a famous racing saying that goes, "speed costs money -- how fast do you want to go?" Anything that would ostensibly save race teams money would be looked at favorably, but only in terms of it providing an additional revenue stream to buy more speed. And so it goes with the new car.

"Because we've had so much initial cost in changing over, [saving money] is going to be a long-term thing, a several-years type of thing to recoup the difference," Joe Gibbs Racing's executive vice president of race operations Jimmy Makar said. "I think we'll eventually see something, but it'll take a couple years to recoup the money we've spent."

"When we first built it, we thought it was pretty much spec [identically built to the same specifications]," Chip Ganassi Racing manager of competition Steve Hmiel said. "But what it made you do was look a lot closer and work within a lot smaller tolerances, but you still get all that you can get. So from that standpoint, it hasn't been easier to build, nor have we been able to have fewer cars."

"It's not happened yet," Richard Childress Racing fabrication shop manager Ronnie Hoover said of any cost savings. "And I think for it to save us any money, down the road, the rules are going to have to be left alone, because we definitely will develop the car we have now, with the rules we have now; looking to develop advantages in aero and just everything until we've exhausted everything that we know to do -- that's just the way we are, as racers.

After the first year, teams haven't seen the cost savings they were told would come with the new car.

"If they just leave the rules alone, we'll get to that point quicker. Because when they make a rule change we go back and look at what we've got, and re-evaluate how to make it better. But it hasn't saved us any money yet."

Roush Fenway Racing's lead engineer, Chris Andrews agreed, and for largely the same reasons.

"From my perspective it hasn't saved us any money, and the reason is because we're competing against all the other teams in the series and we're going to spend the money that's available to us," Andrews said. "You can look at wind tunnel time, for example, and say [the new car] has slashed our wind tunnel budget. But you can see we've spent more this year on seven-post testing than we ever have before.

"It's saved in certain areas, but it's just really difficult to try to race and stay competitive and try to save money [because] they counter each other at every opportunity."

"Right now I don't see [cost savings] coming through," Duchardt said. "It's no more, or no less expensive. We are down a few cars in our car count versus where we were, but the fact is, we have so much labor in these cars, in order to meet the chassis and the body rules that you end up putting more hours into these cars than the previous cars.

"For us anyways, you can't really recognize the efficiencies because you maybe have to have a higher car count than maybe you could if you didn't have all that process involved. With as much time and work we have to put in to fit that [body template] grid and meet all the chassis constraints when we go over to get inspected, we feel like we can't do it with any fewer cars than we have."

Roush Fenway co-owner Jack Roush did say that only having to construct one type of car in 2008 did enable his team to cut its car building staff, and that that had occurred well ahead of teams' current cutbacks due to the weak economy.

Cutting the fleet

Bodine is adamant that the new car is more flexible as far as where it can be used, citing three-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson finishing third in the 2008 Budweiser Shootout at Daytona using his back-up car, which had won the previous fall at Martinsville, the circuit's shortest track.

Bodine said NASCAR also had documentation of several cars that had raced on road courses being used on the superspeedways -- Daytona and Talladega -- and that brings up one of the most integral aspects of the new car.

Back-up cars now consist of chassis run at other tracks which helps teams tremendously.

Along with verifying the chassis' dimensions; in the initial certification process NASCAR also attaches several Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips. Bodine said the RFID process has enabled NASCAR to create a very manageable database of information about cars' histories.

"We can certainly document that through the process that starts in pre-certification, with the installation of the RFID chips that we then read at the race tracks," Bodine said. "So we know what cars have run at what race track, how many laps they've run and if they've been in an accident and what kind of an accident.

"That's all data now that we can confirm as a fact, where with the old car it was kind of hearsay, everything from how many cars do you have, to how many times you've raced it, and where. We know where these cars have raced and how many times they've raced."

Using the data garnered from the RFID chips, Bodine says he's confident there are fewer cars in circulation.

"I think, probably the majority of the teams have taken advantage of the lesser inventory needed to run the series," Bodine said. "No question, there are some teams that haven't, that have over-built. But the fact that we know how many cars actually show up for the races is definitely less than it was prior [to the introduction of the new car].

"There's no question the same car has run at different type tracks, and I'm really pleased at how that's worked out."

But this topic, maybe more than any other, splits the company line somewhat from "garage talk."

"It's reduced it a little bit, but not a lot," Yates Racing co-owner and general manager Max Jones said. "What it has done is make a common build, across the board, for everybody -- so you're just manufacturing cars. You're not going to the wind tunnel and making body changes and things like that. So from that side there are some economies of scale that we're starting to see there. But I'm in a unique situation because I don't have a chassis shop and a body shop and I'm not manufacturing cars."

"We race the same chassis construction on short tracks, intermediates and mile-and-a-half tracks," Andrews said. "We do build purpose-built road-race cars and superspeedway cars; and we change the brake packages and steering boxes for short tracks, and we adjust on the suspension geometry; but we've built a pretty flexible chassis for ourselves and it's been competitive everywhere we've taken it.

"It's not reduced the car count, because each of our teams seems to carry the same number of cars in their inventory, and we've had the same number of cars for the last several years; but it has made the cars more universal."

Hoover runs Childress' car-building operation, and he said RCR has yet to see a reduction in its car fleet; though Kevin Harvick ran the same car in a number of races in 2007, when the new car was introduced on just short tracks of about one-mile and under and road courses.

"They'll have to tighten the box up even a little more to do that," Hoover said. "The pivot points, for the front [suspension] geometry and the personality you'd have with a spring combination at Daytona that you wouldn't at Martinsville -- there's a sweet spot for both ways, so you're going to tailor your package [to the facility]. You might raise the pivot point or do some things with structural rigidity to benefit your Martinsville or Daytona car.

“

I don't think the new car has saved us any money yet. Heading into next year, we'll have 14 cars [for each team] where historically, we'd have 20. I don't want to see any drastic [rule] changes because I don't want to spend any more money.

”

-- JACK ROUSH

"[NASCAR] gives us enough room because everybody in the sport has a different way of skinning the cat, and they can't take that away without benefiting one group more than another, so they've [left it alone]. It may come at some point, but right now there's enough room there to play and experiment, so we're going to do it."

Hmiel said any car's biggest enemies were the very race teams that have to use it, citing the new cars' crab-like attitude on the straights to improve aerodynamic efficiency in the corners.

"You used to do that with the body, but now you do it with the [cambered] rear end, so you have to buy a different rear end," Hmiel said. "I know NASCAR doesn't want to hear it, because their deal is not to have track-specific cars; but it's very hard to legislate frugality to racers, because they're going to go get what they can get, and it's hard to make a rule to keep them from getting it."

Denny Hamlin has raced with his own cars, early in his career, and he sees a definite cutback at his Joe Gibbs Racing team.

"You're still going to be able to take a road course car to Talladega if you want to," Hamlin said. "NASCAR is doing everything in the right direction to cut costs to make your fleet of cars less. I'm looking at Joe Gibbs Racing, and I don't have as many cars as I had with the old car [and] that's already a plus for the team owners."

"It's much better than it was before, though we're probably not as good as we could be as far as using cars at a lot of different places," Makar said. "The mile-and-a-half cars down through the short tracks can pretty much be the same cars, with the only changes being to the brake ducts and brakes we use -- but the chassis and body are all the same."

Roush said that even though he agreed with Andrews about money, shaving development time and the numbers of cars would be a plus. Andrews said an informal garage poll would indicate teams were competing with anywhere from 10 to 16 or 17 cars, with the Roush Fenway teams somewhere in the middle.

"I don't think the new car has saved us any money yet," Roush said. "But over this winter we're not going to do the wind tunnel testing that we've done in the past [when] you take everybody off of every car to work on a new package that's supposed to be better. We're not doing that this year. We're building new cars where we need them.

"Heading into next year, we'll have 14 cars [for each team] where historically, we'd have 20. I don't want to see any drastic [rule] changes because I don't want to spend any more money."

He has enough racers to take care of that for him.

"We're definitely on the spending side," Hmiel said of the competition departments. "We've got people on the side for making money, and we keep chasing them because any [money] we can get, we're going to spend."

Streamlining the process

For race teams, playtime can't start until NASCAR certifies a car's basic chassis, a process that occurs at the Research & Development Center in Concord, N.C.

But as critical as it is to the overall management of the new car program, the certification process has "basically become a non-event," Bodine said. "The process has really taken shape and it's very streamlined and very easy. Teams now know how to get their inventories set so whether they're making construction changes based off performance issues or dealing with accident repair, that process has moved right along.

Inside R&D Center

• Pt. 1: Safety meets innovation
• Pt. 2: The stock-car's future
• Pt. 3: Chassis inspection
• Pt. 4: From the driver's seat
• Pt. 5: Driver Approval

"I think if you ask any race team about the certification process, they're pretty pleased with the way it's all taken shape."

"We know the system, and [NASCAR] is very consistent with what they do," Hoover said of the process. "It's a little bit of a headache to do that, but we understand why [it's done]. But they're very consistent on what they tell us each week, so we've come to a point where we know what to ship down [to the R&D Center].

"It's just a matter of obligating the time each week and sending a truck down there delivering one [chassis] and picking another one up. If it's just part of the package, we're going to deal with it and make the most of it."

It points out the fact that, in a sport where competition between the teams is almost as intense as the sparring match between NASCAR and the teams to keep things perfectly legal, that maybe the best communication level ever, keeps things running more smoothly.

"It's definitely improved and [NASCAR] has learned, as well as we have how to [communicate] better," Hoover said. "In the past, it's always been a visual thing, like, 'we don't like it.' But now, if they're running across an issue that they're seeing consistently on anybody's cars, they'll address it and make sure that everybody understands where they want us to be with that process.

"It's real clear, and they've done a good job with that."

"Whether it's a new certification or a re-certification, it's done online -- call us up or e-mail us and let us know you're going to need an appointment to get something certified, and we just work the schedule," Bodine said. "And what's good about the whole process is that teams are flexible enough that if it's a 9-1-1 situation, where I've got a car and I want to turn it around, other race teams will shuffle their spots, knowing they're not a 9-1-1. It just takes someone to manage that and we've been able to do that at the R&D Center."

Damage control

Furniture Row Racing had perhaps the most nightmarish stretch of anyone in the Cup garage when its driver, Joe Nemechek, was involved in accidents in seven of 12 races, from the summer into the fall.

Using the new car versus the old didn't change the immediate dynamic of unloading a wrecked race car at the shop, but Bodine's take is the standardization of the car helps here, as well.

Furniture Row Racing had its work cut out for it this season when Joe Nemechek ran into a rough patch during the season.

"I don't think the process of making the decision of whether to fix a car or take it out of service matters from the old car to the new car," Bodine said. "The thing that does help with the new car is that cars are standardized -- everything's in the exact same position no matter what car you've got.

"So some teams will probably take the philosophy that it's quicker to just build a new car or to replace the [wrecked] car with one that's sitting in the corner, because the one sitting in the corner can multi-task -- it's not built to be track-specific.

"When it comes down to it and we can verify how many cars teams have that are certified as track legal, but they're not taking that many to the race tracks, I think we have to assume that they're taking advantage of that process in which you can build three cars and set them in a corner and when you wreck a car, you just take one and replace it, whereas in the past if I had to replace one of five or six track-specific cars, I didn't have all those sitting over in a corner."

Yates Racing's Jones is in a position, whether it's with personnel or parts and pieces, in which he's got to do more with less. So he takes a simple view of reconditioning cars that have been damaged.

"If the clip's bent, you've got to put a new clip on it, and the same thing if it needs a body," Jones said of the new car. "It is a little bit more labor intensive because of the template set that [NASCAR] has got over the top of this thing and the tolerances are so close.

"If you rub a side or you rub something [now] you've got to go back and put a whole new body on it, whereas before you'd beat [the dents] out, mud [body filler] some things and send it back through. But you're not able to do that any more, so it is pretty labor-intense and the turnaround time on the cars is a lot longer than it used to be."

"It's not as simple as it once was, and the reason why, is that the whole body will take a shock [even in a right-side impact with the wall] and it does move around," Hoover said. "So basically we have to take it in, clean off all the bent metal that we see and set it back on the build plate."

Hoover described the system whereby teams have duplicates of NASCAR's "grid" of templates that locate cars' bodies to excruciating detail, and "basically blueprint all the key points, the 'gold standard,' they call it, on the bodies, to make sure we're still in the box, because [NASCAR] doesn't really care if we wreck it or not -- all they know is that it's not legal."

Hoover said that with the intricate measuring system now in place, a right-side hit could alter the car's "hard point" measurements on the left side, "so it's a little more in-depth and we've got to stay on top of that."

As much as the process has become protracted for teams that have every function in-house, it's even more so for Yates. Jones used the example of a speedway car that had been "flat-sided" at Daytona by running it into the fence, also bending a front or rear clip.

"It depends on the organization and what you have," Jones said. "If you had your own chassis shop and your own set of guys sitting there, you could turn one around in a week."

Yates Racing's two-car team this season used one of the smaller groups in the garage, but they're partners with Roush in the Roush Yates Engines Ford engine building company; and Yates gets its chassis from Roush Fenway Racing, which has every racing aspect besides engines within its compound.

"But if you're in a situation where I am, and you've got to go back to your manufacturer and drop it off and have it fit into their schedule and turn it around, it's taking a little longer now," Jones said. "But I'm getting great service from Roush Fenway on that side of it, and we've never done without.

"So I think that's probably a tribute to [general manager] Robbie Reiser and those guys over at Roush Fenway, where they've been able to adjust accordingly and get their scheduling and manufacturing down to the point where they can turn the cars around pretty darned quick."

But one consequence of the process, for some teams, is looking twice before deciding what to do.

"It affects our decision on what we're going to do because the cars are a little bit more difficult to turn around," Andrews said. "Our policy is to never plan on racing the same car two weeks in a row because it is a little bit more difficult than it used to be because the tolerances on the templates are so much tighter.

"So we basically inspect our cars when they come back from a race to see if they could be raced again or if they need work. And when it comes to damage, it's not very often that we put front and rear clips on cars any more because by that point we can almost build a new car as quickly or as nicely as we could repair one.

"And we've been able to keep the cost of that contained, so it affects the decision, for sure."

"The process we have to go through definitely changes how we look at a damaged car," Hoover said. "The reason why is we know that we basically have to obligate a set amount of time to go through that certification process again before we can take [a repaired car] back to the track.

"So when we schedule a car to be turned around, say if Kevin [Harvick] wanted to take his Martinsville car to Phoenix, then we have to take into consideration that, say it bent the front clip, then it's got to be re-certified and we've got to designate a day to do that, whereas in the past we could just take it, put a clip on it and send it back to the track -- well within the rules, but it just wasn't certified.

"So we've got to obligate a set amount of time to get it certified, and there's a certain amount of time spent making sure we're in that [template] box each week, where we didn't [have to] in the past. Now, we're worried about [being within] 40-thousandths when in the past we were worried about a quarter of an inch."

"It's not like they're more delicate, or anything else," Hmiel said. "If you wrecked a [new car] bad enough to throw it out, you would have wrecked one of last year's cars bad enough to throw it out. We have to be smarter about making sure they're right, but we're not throwing out any more cars than we ever have.

"Tolerances are smaller, and that terrified us, at first. But we said the same thing when inspection went from eyeballing 'em to having any kind of templates. We thought we couldn't build 'em that way, but people adapt. They figure it out."

Standing pat

As a rule, racers don't like being tied by too many regulations, but NASCAR's move to the new car created the most restrictive "box" its teams have ever been in. And even as the car's development continues, NASCAR made a decision most teams welcomed when it "froze" its rulebook for 2009, with no changes to the car's specifications.

"Saying we're keeping the box intact is a good way of putting it," Bodine said. "Everybody's still in development, so until you can define an area that certainly needs some attention, why make a moving target?

"When you're in economic times like we are, rule changes and changes in general cost money to make, not just on the parts and pieces that are there, but also the testing and [analysis] of those changes; so the closer we can keep to business as usual, the better off we are and the better job we're doing of serving our teams on the cost side."

"I would say that not making [rule] changes does help us from a cost standpoint," Duchardt said. "Because any time you make a change and we have to go back, and redo things that adds cost. So in some aspects I can see that the carryover rules are beneficial in that way because there's nothing we have to go and develop or a bunch of cars we have to rework."

Robbie Loomis, Petty Enterprises' executive vice president of racing operations and a former champion crew chief with Hendrick Motorsports, said the financial benefit of the new car could come, and stabilizing the rulebook was a good start.

"I can only look at what our organization has done with it," Loomis said earlier in the fall. "I can see benefits coming down the road if we don't keep jumping around with the rules. This winter is going to be a lot different if we're not all cutting our bodies off and having our fabricators turned upside down."

Loomis, whose first stint at Petty Enterprises began nearly 30 years ago, said the biggest impact of the rules package would come early next year.

"Usually the tradition is, we go to Daytona and test and come back and cut all our bodies off and return to Daytona two weeks later [for Speedweeks]," Loomis said. "There's going to be some real benefits in that [rules freeze] area."

"It would be a positive if everybody was happy with what they had," Hoover said. "And they're really struggling to get the car to drive right, and from that standpoint I don't think it's something that you could say 'I think they need to leave it alone' yet; because it's somewhat of a knife edge, what we race each week.

“

I can see benefits coming down the road if we don't keep jumping around with the rules. This winter is going to be a lot different if we're not all cutting our [car] bodies off and having our fabricators turned upside down.

”

-- ROBBIE LOOMIS

"We haven't found that sweet spot yet. We keep dancing around it. It's such a small window of success for us. It seems like some guys have got a little bit better hold on it, where we may stumble across it and figure out a portion of the process -- maybe for one track and one week."

According to Hoover, there's still plenty of room in which to massage the new car that teams were given more than two years ago with an original plan to phase it into full use over three years, or for the 2009 season.

"It's still an open book," Hoover said. "There's still enough there, within the parameters that they gave us, that there are areas to gain -- and we're racers, so we're going to look. If everybody else didn't look, we wouldn't look, either. But you know that's not going to happen."

"NASCAR's done a great job of keeping up with it, and I think there'll be more rules as to how far the cars can be twisted and things of that nature, as we go forward," Hmiel said of how teams have figured out how to manipulate weight to better places. "But this time last year it seemed a lot more likely that you could run one car more places than you can now.

"At Martinsville, there were some really light cars. I'm not talking about illegal cars, but people worked really hard on their Martinsville cars this year and their road race cars this year, to get weight out of 'em -- but you probably wouldn't see one of 'em at Texas.

"NASCAR's disappointed that it's worked out this way, but the trouble is they're dealing with a bunch of racers. At first we thought there was nothing you could do to make this little car any better. But then we said, 'You know what? There are little areas we can work in,' so you go to work.

"From October of 2007 to October of 2008 we found out that the eighth-inches here and there that we thought wouldn't make a difference, make a difference, so we're trying like mad to take advantage of all that. It didn't turn out the way we thought it'd turn out."

Kyle Busch, who won the new car's first race, at Bristol in 2007, then promptly got out and bashed it, said he'd vote for changes.

"It's very, very frustrating to drive that thing every day or every week," said Busch, who won eight times this season. "There's a lot of things that [NASCAR] could do to help us out -- to help it drive better. They just never listen, don't want to listen.

"[NASCAR's] going to leave it the way it is, no model change, pretty much because they don't want to -- the economy is bad and all that stuff, whatever. They're not going to change -- everything because of the economy. The Cup cars might as well stay the same and we'll have the same shows next year that we had this year probably."

Andrews didn't totally agree with Busch, though in the end he thought the rules freeze was good.

"We think we do a pretty good job of adapting to new rules, so I wouldn't mind more changes, because it would give us another opportunity to get a step ahead," Andrews said. "But I know there was a lot of criticism of the COT races, early-on, so from NASCAR's perspective, to make the racing better -- which it [was, late in the year] when they were pretty spectacular shows so from that perspective it's better to [freeze] the rules and let everybody work and make their cars better.

"It seems like, whenever they want to shake up the playing field they'll make a rule change and that spreads everybody out again."

Hmiel, who spent a good chunk of his career successfully working for Roush Racing, echoed Andrews' take from his own experience.

"I think putting a hold on the rules is a good thing," Hmiel said. "Because like Jack Roush always said, 'give me a rule change any day because I think I have the wherewithal and the instincts -- and I'll go find the cash and the right people to go find the loopholes before anybody else.'

"So any time there's a rule change, you run down this path of spending to understand what it does to the vehicle, dynamically and how you have to seven-post test and test in the wind tunnel. It's just cost, cost, cost -- and not just the cost of the vehicle, but the cost of developing the vehicle. So freezing rules is a good deal."

Never the status quo

It remains to be seen how long race teams' creative geniuses will be content to be constrained by such a restrictive box, as Duchardt explained the transition to the new car.

"NASCAR had a goal and I'm assuming part of their goal was to get control over the aerodynamics of the car," Duchardt said. "In doing so, our body-building manufacturing has gone from a development process to a strict manufacturing process and trying to duplicate and meet the templates as quickly and as accurately as possible instead of trying to find the next pound of downforce or the next count of drag reduction."

"I think we still have some challenges in front of us as far as working with NASCAR and the teams," Loomis said. "There are certain race tracks that I think provide great racing. There are other race tracks that we really have to take a look at and see if there is a little something that we can do to work with the car to make it better."

Loomis used to sit in the perfect seat to make such judgments and he easily deferred the responsibility back to what's seen as the best minds in the business, even as he ponders his race team's future.

"I think that it's got to be the crew chiefs: The Chad Knauses, Steve Letartes, Tony Eury Jr.s and Bob Osbornes of the world -- the Kenny Francises," Loomis said. "Those are the guys that we have to listen to because they could really give us the feedback to help make [the new car] better for everyone in the sport."

"Everyone's done a really good job of figuring out what these cars really want," Hmiel said. "The drivers have decided that they're never going to drive like the old car, which is fine because it's a different car. Compared to the first day we ran these things, this car has come an awful long way, and compared to the first time we raced these things, it's come an awful long way."

"In the last 30 days it's come an awful long way, Hmiel said shortly before the Homestead finale. "So people are smart enough to figure it all out, and they haven't spent an awful lot of time complaining."

"It's a lot smaller window than we've ever had," Hoover said. "So from a team standpoint, it's us trying to be creative but stay in the box; and [NASCAR] trying to do their job as far as stopping us -- and so far, we've kind of been staying within the lines."

As promised, NASCAR has ratcheted up the penalties for technical violations with the new car, with the current, seemingly standard level being 150 points taken from the driver and car owner, a $100,000 fine for the crew chief and suspension of both the crew chief and his main assistant, the car chief.

Hoover said that system, which for better or worse is the new car's current most noteworthy legacy, creates an impenetrable bottom line.

"We are by no means going to get out of the box," Hoover said. "The penalty that comes with that is not worth it, in any way. As they say, the benefit of what there is to gain does not outweigh the circumstance [of getting caught]."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.