What the… COT?!?!

Ok, so now that I have everyone’s attention, there’s something that I want to talk about that has been on my mind for a while. Something that has drastically changed the core of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, and that’s the COT… well, it’s no longer the car of tomorrow, it’s the car of today, but for this purpose, let’s call it the new car.

I applaud NASCAR for trying to make a safer car. We have had tragedies in racing that could have been averted should the proper safety measures been in place. I can start name dropping at this point about this guy and that guy and how horrible it was. But I won’t do that out of respect for these men. And the truth of the matter is that back in the day, these men were gladiators. They knew that every time they got into that big, heavy, power, nasty race car of theirs, they might not be getting out of it at the end of the day. What do you think Dale Earnhardt would have said if you told him that you had the balls to get in that 800HP car and go all out around the track with 40 other racers. He would have looked at you up and down and would have probably laughed it off. It took a special kind of person back then to be a race car driver. It took a lot more than just being a good driver. With the risk of being chastised, I will venture to say that part (big part…) of the appeal of racing is the danger factor. Watching someone do the almost impossible and getting out alive. Wow, that was a spectacle…..

Nowadays with all these safety improvements, I think NASCAR has lost a bit of its appeal. Don’t get me wrong, I would never wish anything bad to happen to anyone, but you can’t deny the feeling you get inside when something happens on the track. Already, this new car has saved the lives of a few drivers involved in horrible crashes. Crashes that could have had much worse consequences. And I think everyone is thankful for this, but you can’t deny that it’s changed the way you look at NASCAR.

You also can’t deny that although wanting to make the racing more competitive is a great and noble goal, it has had the side effect of creating long, boring stretches of racing. NASCAR’s attempt at resolving this with the double file restart was a great idea, and in its own rights works very well, it hasn’t changed the fact that the racing has suffered. Now I’m sure a lot of people will want to quote the stats of how many lead changes and different winners in a season and so on to show that the racing has gotten more competitive, in reality, only a small portion of the races are this way, therefore causing skewed stats. With the double file restarts, yes we’ll get more lead changes and last lap passes for the win, but the rest of the race was still a snoozer…

Now a lot of people have been complaining about how the new car looks. I’ll admit that I rather like the look. It looks more like a real car then the old car did, that’s for sure. But it still isn’t quite right. Now it would seem they have the right idea with the Nationwide COT. If you’ve seen any of the pictures, you’ll notice that they look much more like their production counter cart. Especially the challenger. I can’t wait to see it on the track for the first time. Will it affect the racing the way the Cup car has… I don’t know. I don’t think anyone can predict this. Let’s just hope that NASCAR gives the teams a bit more freedom with what they can actually do with the car.

I understand the concept of by not allowing people to change anything, you essentially get everyone in the same car. But what’s the point of having all these teams behind their driver. If we wanted an IROC race… we’d be watching IROC… and look at where that went. Might as well have NASCAR make all the cars and just ship them straight to the track and have the teams take possession of the cars when they get there. Save all that money on engineering, have NASCAR do it all and just pay them instead… Ok, I might be going a bit overboard here but you get the point. Giving the teams some flexibility would go a long way to making the racing better. I’m not saying to let them run wild, but sit down with the team engineers and look at what the possibilities might be, and then go from there. I think that on top of helping their on track product, this would also get a lot of angry fans off their backs.

And finally, there is one last thing that I think needs to be discussed, and please, leave me your comments on your thoughts about this below. There is no need to register to leave comments. You don’t even have to put your real name and email address if you don’t want to, so please take a minute and let me know what you think about all these cars going air born. There were safeties in place on the old cars to make sure they didn’t take off like a plane on a runway. So why do these new cars seem so susceptible to wanting to take off? I’m sure at this point NASCAR is taking a close look at this but I think this problem could cause major safety concerns and totally defeat the purpose of the safety improvements of this new car. If not for the fencing at Talladega, Carl Edwards’ car would have no doubt killed hundreds of people in the stands. Lots of people were injured even with the fence in place. NASCAR has said they would study what happened and make sure they had a resolution to make sure the fence held… fence? Are you kidding me… how about trying to fix the car.


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