Penske - Smarter Than the Average Bear
He’s Testing COT Dodges for Talladega in Fall
 Kurt Busch’s Miller Lite Dodge in COT ‘Speedway’ configuration gets the jump on testing at Daytona. |
Ever wonder why a guy like Roger ‘The Captain’ Penske does so well in whatever he takes on? Part of it has to be his forward thinking. While other teams are testing the cars they will be using for this year’s Daytona 500 in February, Penske South and their Dodges are testing the Daytona version of NASCAR’s Car Of Tomorrow (COT) for a race that won’t flag off until Fall of this year. Crazy? Yeah, like a fox.
Maybe it’s the simple logic. All cars that will be used in the upcoming Daytona 500 are, in effect, lame duck race cars. They will be used in three of the four restrictor plate races this year before being ‘pluto-ed’ out for the last race of the season at Talladega October 7. So the smart money (read that as Penske) says why invest any more time and money in a car that will only be used three more times in its life? Yeah, like a fox.
Then there’s the advantage part. By testing with NASCAR’s cooperation, Penske South gets a leg up on the competition by getting what is likely the first seat time with the COT in Plate Track trim. It’s like a tire test. You spend some quality time with the same tires everyone will be racing and you’ve got a slight advantage. You think that after these short tests, the crew chiefs for Ryan Newman and Kurt Bush won’t have a great baseline that pretty much no other crew chief will have? Yeah, like a fox.
So right in the middle of January testing, opps, make that Jackson Hewitt Preseason Thunder, out rolls the Penske cars ready to try out the infamous ‘splitter’ and ‘wing’ combo (say, isn’t that a new menu item at Hooters?) and make every other crew chief in the garage groan with a head-slapping ‘Wish I’d thought of that.’
The idea behind it was cool with Kurt Bush who said in advance of the test, “It's just a matter of us wanting to get ahead of the game and set the curve and raise the bar for people thinking they've got their COT scienced out. We've got ours here ready to go for a speedway test. We've got three built. One is a test mule that will probably not ever be approved. I guess the process of getting a COT approved is a bit tougher. That's our mule.”
 Busch talks to the media at Daytona about the new COT he tested. |
So where is Penske on their COT program? "We've got a couple of other cars,” said Busch. “One is a speedway type. It's a little slicker and one is for downforce for all of the short tracks those cars will run on. I think we're doing pretty good with our car count as well as changing all our Chargers to the new nose. Quite a bit of work is going down, but in the end this car of tomorrow is going to be a good thing. I can't say that right now it's approved by everybody's standards but for us and myself the interjection of safety is obviously the key thing.”
After some 190 mph-plus testing, it was Ryan Newman who got the first word in. "I think we got three or four runs in trying a couple of different things. It drove OK. It stuck pretty good. It seems like it stuck better than the other car, but we'll see what it's like when it gets in dirty air and traffic.” When asked about the smokin’ hot lap that his teammate cranked off, Newman said, “I never saw it, but I heard about it and I think I might have heard him go by. That's cool as far as speed goes, but that's not the way we can race around here especially when you get 15 of them in a line. It'll be really hauling the mail. We proved today you can't take the plates off of them. That was still a pretty good size plate on there and that was 190 something mph. Until we get less horsepower will we run with less restrictor plate or no restrictor plate."
