Teams get down to business, up to decent speeds with new cars

Bristol track hosts 'car of tomorrow' testing

What they were, were race cars.

"My car,” Jeff Burton said Wednesday at Bristol Motor Speedway, “doesn’t drive like a spaceship.”

Even though the Nextel Cup cars running around the 0.533-mile high-banked Bristol oval Wednesday looked very different, before the much-anticipated two-day “car of tomorrow” test had been going very long at all the teams were doing many of the same things they always do when preparing for a race.

“From a driver’s perspective, once you get in the car it’s just a car,” Burton said. “In my world, it’s no longer about the car of tomorrow, it’s just about me doing better in it than anybody else. My car needs to turn better, which is what I said the last time we raced here.”

The fact that more than three dozen teams quickly got down to the business of making their cars get around the track better was the headline of the opening day of the test. There were no surprise issues, inspection horror stories or startlingly obvious flaws to create any kind of major crises.

Yes, the new car with its “splitter” on the front and a wing in place of a spoiler on the back, looks different. The drivers seemed to quickly grow fond of the extra room they have inside the taller and wider greenhouse area. And speeds were, not surprisingly for the first major full-scale test of a brand new racing vehicle, off the track record by seven-tenths of a second.

“It’s not about trying to go out and blister a lap,” Ricky Rudd said. “It would be nice if when I go out every time we had something new that worked better than the last time. But the real world is we’ll come out of here knowing which way do we need to go with our car and that’s all everyone is trying to do.”

Greg Biffle, who had two No. 16 Fords among the fastest in the morning session, was more than pleased with his team’s effort. “We went to Rockingham and tested and that was a disaster,” Biffle said. “…It was bouncing around, but we got on the race track here after they did a lot of work back at the shop.”

Burton said he saw a lot of different agendas at the test, which continues today as teams prepare for the first race using the car of tomorrow on March 25 at Bristol.

“Some people are here to win the test, and some are here to try and learn by doing a lot of different things,” Burton said. “Some teams are really just getting their first shot at this car.”

Burton said he has laughed at preseason talk that Richard Childress Racing had moved ahead of the rest of the teams in developing the new car through extensive testing.

“Do you think the Hendrick teams’ guys have been just hanging around at the lake?” Burton said. “For some reason, word got out there that we were working hard on it and that would give us some big advantage. I am proud of the work we’ve done, but a lot of people have done a lot of work.”

Jimmie Johnson said the four Hendrick Motorsports teams came to Bristol with specific areas to work in as they broke in their new cars.

“We’re hoping to cover a lot of ground, and then we’ll get together and see what everybody has learned,” Johnson said. “I feel like we’re off to a decent start.”