Yesterday’s Aaron’s 499 is only the second time that the Car of Tomorrow (CoT) has been at Talladega in competition and only the third time that it has been on a superspeedway.  Looking at the first two times, I’m not sure how much they really represented the CoT’s performance. 

At the Talladega race last October, everyone was curious as to what exactly to expect from the CoT.  Everyone seemed very content to run single file and just tick off laps.  It was, by all accounts, one of the most boring times that I’ve ever seen at Talladega.  I don’t know if it was the CoT, the fact it was a Chase race or what but it was just painful.  It epitomized what non-NASCAR fans say all the time about sitting and watching a bunch of cars drive around in a circle.

Fast-forward about four months to Daytona this year.  The CoT is here to stay, it’s the second plate race that the car has been in and the drivers and teams have had some more time to test and figure this car out.  It was a much better race, all the way down to when Kurt Busch pushed his teammate Ryan Newman past Tony Stewart and Kyle Busch like they were sitting still for the win at the tail end of the last lap.  Even then, I heard a lot complaints from people who were saying that the CoT wasn’t as fun to watch as the old car.  I enjoyed the heck out of Daytona this year.  Of course, I had been race deprived for about 3 months.  I do have to remind people, the CoT didn’t create boring races, we had plenty of them well before the CoT was ever thought about.

Now, here we are at Talladega again.  We’ve now had a eight straight races this season in the CoT.  Drivers and crews have shown that they’ve started figuring this car out.  Man, have they ever.  To anyone that called the race yesterday boring, I’d have to laugh and ask what they were expecting to see.  That was one of the most exciting races that I’d seen in quite a while, all they way down to the last lap crash.  I also ask, who amongst us that is a regular fan of Talladega, did not expect the last two crashes?  Talladega is well known for the "big one" and yesterday was no exception.

Now for the bad part.  I expect that the restrictor plate will be looked at back in Concord NC this week.  Several times during the race yesterday I saw cars running well over 200 mph.  Tony Stewart and Denny Hamlin were running at between 204 and 206 mph at one point.  There is no way that NASCAR Tech will miss that.  I look for the plate to be resized in time for the July race at Daytona in an attempt to keep em below 200 mph.

Here’s a bit of trivia for you.  How fast can a car go around the track at Talladega without the plate?  In 2004, Rusty Wallace ran 228 mph during a test without a restrictor plate.  In the article, Rusty said that he felt that they could get 235 mph out of it with some tweaking.  The track qualifying record is held by Awesome Bill Elliott from back in 1987 for the Winston 500 where he qualified at 212.809 mph.  That was the race where Bobby Allison flew into the catch fencing injuring spectators after his car blew a tire and got backwards in the tri-oval, highlighting the need for the restrictor plate.