After a couple of years of development and six months of testing, NASCAR’s Car of Tomorrow makes its debut next month on the 0.533-mile Bristol short track. A strictly-defined ‘spec’ car that’s taller and wider then the existing car the new Nextel Cup car will be required for sixteen races this year on tracks less than 1.5 miles, plus the two road courses and the fall Talladega race.
Next year, the Car of Tomorrow also runs at the superspeedways and 2-mile tracks, and in 2009, it will run everywhere. Some people believe the CoT will prove to be a horror show and will have to be withdrawn for further development, but many team owners want to see the transition to the new car compressed into a maximum of two years rather than extending it into ‘09.
NASCAR’s leaders believe the chunkier Car of Tomorrow will substantially improve safety and also reduce costs at least for the smaller teams. According to Robin Pemberton, NASCAR’s competition director, the primary driving force behind the CoT has been to improve safety.
“We’ve come a long way on safety, but we’ve got to move forward, and that’s what we’ve done with this car,” Pemberton remarked.
NASCAR decided to retain the basic suspension layout and components used for the past thirty or more years, although the suspension has been made symmetrical to make more room for the driver and to bring him, or her, closer to the centreline of the car.
“We wanted to use those parts and pieces that we’re used to working on for the last number of decades,” Pemberton observed. “We wanted to keep those parts and move things around so we could get the room to integrate high energy impact foam into the sides of the cockpit and make sure we had enough room for the modern carbon fibre seats. We also wanted a bigger cockpit that is a safe environment for all sizes of drivers. A lot of effort has gone into that.”
