The Glen presents bevy of headaches for Cup crews (cont'd)

With its high speeds, The Glen is hard on brakes. Cooper said the test at Road Atlanta was beneficial in that regard.

"Our brake package is huge," he said. "We're trying something completely different than we had at Sonoma. We tried to prove it out at Road Atlanta, and we did. We had great results with it, and Kyle was very pleased with it."

Mechanically, Watkins Glen holds the potential for destruction of various systems, Cooper said, most of them driver-controlled.

"If they miss a shift or over-rev it, it can really tear the top end off the engine, knock the tips off the valve springs, or whatever," he said. "It's really at the driver's discretion on how tough Watkins Glen is on the racecar. I'm not really concerned about that with Kyle. He's good on equipment, good on the brakes."

The test at Road Atlanta was by design, because the track is high-speed, features some elevation change and has a Turn 1 that's something close to Turn 1 at The Glen.

"Road Atlanta is quite a bit different than VIR or Kershaw [in South Carolina]," Cooper said. "It does have a lot of elevation changes and it is a high-speed facility. You carry a lot of speed at Watkins Glen, similar to Road Atlanta."

The biggest challenge facing Cooper and his fellow crew chiefs at The Glen is the fact that adjustments are still a work in progress for many. The so-far-fruitless search for the new car's sweet spot continues.

"If it has one, we haven't found it yet," said Cooper with a laugh, echoing other crew chiefs' comments. "That's probably a pretty standard response. We've found some things, where before we were just making big swings at it trying to fix problems and we weren't able to. We're learning on things as we go and building a trouble-shooting page where we can do some fine-tuning and be consistent as far as how you make changes.

"The bump-stop factor that we're in now is a big deal. You have different load variations when you start changing your wedge around. You have to be very careful and know what you're going to do and try to take the guesswork out of it. If you have issues with certain things, then you don't need to go try that again until you can do some development work and find out what it does."

In-race adjustments often don't do what they're supposed to, or in some cases, do too much, Cooper said.

"In terms of race adjustments, you have to be careful," he said. "The first week I was with Kyle, we were pretty good at Richmond. We were fighting some forward bite issues and came in for a small wedge adjustment in the left-rear and it absolutely killed the car. We were like, 'Man, there's no way that can be happening.' Come to find out, the driver is the one driving it and telling you what's going on, and they're not lying to you. It's really doing what they say it's doing, but the changes are doing triple to five times the adjustment you're trying to make even when it's very small."

Even with challenges stacked up like cord wood around the transporter, Cooper is confident that he and Petty can conquer them this weekend.

"Going anywhere with Kyle gives a guy comfort," he said. "He's familiar with everywhere and he's been racing as long as I've been alive. He knows what he wants, knows what it needs to feel like right off the bat. If there was something that was really going to stand out from a mechanical perspective, it would have shown up during the test. Knowing that we can unload and be really close mechanically gives me a lot of comfort, that and knowing that all we have to work on is our chassis."

Strategically, Cooper said it's all about clean air.

"With these [new] cars, clean air is so, so important, and you have to look at it that way," he said. "Track position is more important than tires, and it's more important than it's ever been."

Given last week's debut of rain tires in the Nationwide Series race at Montreal, Cooper was asked how he would react if NASCAR had that in the plans this weekend [the rain tires have not been mentioned as yet, and it's likely they won't be].

"I don't know," he said. "I guess you'll just have to deal with it. If they [NASCAR] are going to do that, they need to look at the preparation side of things, to make sure these teams are prepared for something like that. I know it's up to us to be prepared, but from the Nationwide side it looked like it was sort of controlled chaos [at Montreal]. It looked very crazy there for a while.

"If they're going to do it, they need to say they're going to do it. I worked in the Nationwide Series for several years, and they said they were going to do certain things. It would rain during practice and we wouldn't go to the rain tires. It would rain a little during the race and we wouldn't go to the rain tires. Now, all of a sudden, they flipped the switch. It caught a few of those guys off-guard."

Based on preparation and anticipation, it doesn't appear that Cooper or the rest of the Petty Enterprises team is going to be caught off-guard by much of anything this weekend.