After years of anticipation, Car of Tomorrow a reality

It was about the width of a single leaf of paper, but it was too much. The Car of Tomorrow chassis built by Richard Childress Racing flunked an in-house inspection because a door bar was 17 thousandths of an inch too low.

It was the third time the Childress team had junked a car because it didn't comply exactly with the razor-thin tolerances allowed by NASCAR's Car of Tomorrow inspection process. And it was when Bobby Hutchens began to wonder exactly what it was going to take to get one of them onto the racetrack.

"For about a week of two," said RCR's vice president for competition, "panic probably set in on all these Cup teams."

Now, the time for panic is past. The Car of Tomorrow, a project seven years in the making that promises a safer, more competitive racing environment, becomes a reality with Sunday's Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway. All the questions about how long it will take the COT to be inspected, how well it will race, and whether it will hold up to the rigors of the Nextel Cup Series will begin to be answered Thursday morning, when haulers carrying the new vehicles enter the half-mile track in East Tennessee.

What's received the most attention thus far is the appearance of the car, which features a splitter under the nose and a rear wing that will be issued by NASCAR to teams as they arrive at the racetrack each week. It's also taller, with added headroom for a driver who is moved more toward the center of the vehicle. The goal is to provide a more aerodynamically-balanced racecar, with adjustable parts that lower costs by negating the need for track-specific vehicles.

That's the idea, at least. Yet despite months of work by race teams and tests on every conceivable type of track, no one will really know how the COT will perform under race conditions until the green flag drops at Bristol on Sunday.

"There's just too many unknowns right now," said five-time Bristol winner Jeff Gordon. "Once we get through the race and we understand that car a little bit more, then we can probably answer some of those questions. But it's going to be an interesting weekend from the time trucks and crews get to the track to the time we leave, because it's about going through inspection."

Inspection is the teams' most pressing concern. During the COT test at Bristol earlier this month, it took more than an hour for just one car to pass through the multi-stationed inspection process. Instead of the standard individual templates, a large shell drops down over the top of the vehicle. The process is tighter than ever; all the cars that went through inspection on the initial day of the Bristol test failed on their first attempt.

That experience led NASCAR to open the garage at Bristol a day earlier than usual, to give cars more time to get through technical inspection without missing practice laps. Inspection begins at 10 a.m. Thursday, with the first practice session set for 10:30 a.m. Friday. (Continued)