Raybestos Rookie Paul Menard was one of the quickest cars in testing this week at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway. The October 7 Ford UAW 500 at Talladega will be the first event for the Car of Tomorrow at a restrictor-plate track.

PAUL MENARD, No. 15 MENARDS/SYLVANIA CHEVROLET: DOES THE CAR OF TOMORROW DRIVE DRAMATICALLY DIFFERENT AT TALLADEGA VERSUS THE TRADITIONAL CAR? “Yeah, it drivers a lot better. It’s Talladega where the old cars drove pretty good with the new surface. The new car definitely has more downforce and it seems like you can get pretty good runs on people, not probably as good as I would have thought, but still pretty good runs. You can suck up and carry the pass around ‘em. It should be fun.” WILL QUALIFYING REMAIN THE SAME? “I think so. You’ll probably have less that you can do to make it go fast. The bodies are all so dang close that there is not a whole lot you can do with tweaking on the bodies. It’s all about horsepower and getting the rear end sucked down.” DID YOU EXPERIMENT WITH DIFFERENT PLATES? “We had a little bit bigger plate with the bigger wicker and then we went to a smaller plate with a smaller wicker. I have no idea what we’re going to go back with, probably something totally different. It wasn’t a whole lot of difference as far as driving. They drove really good regardless of what you put on there. They were concerned about the speed, trying to keep the speeds down. You can’t tell the difference between five miles per hour anyway. They were just trying to slow us down so we don’t go as fast. I think with the bigger plate and the small wicker we were closer to 200. We have telemetry and I was like 204 in the draft going down the backstretch and they want to keep it under 200.” WERE YOU HAPPY WITH THE TEST? “The test was good. We learned some things and I think we have a pretty good piece. Restrictor plate racing is what it is. It’s not always the best cars. It’s whoever gets in the right line with the right friend. We’ll go try and make some friends, I guess [smiles].” IN THE PAST YOU COULD TAKE A CAR BACK TO THE SHOP AND MAKE MAJOR CHANGES. CAN YOU DO THAT WITH THE COT? “To some extent, yeah, but you’re just really limited with the body as far as what you can do. WE spent some time in the wind tunnel with it and with as much time as we spent we made very minimal gains because there’s not anything you can do. It comes down to horsepower, I think.”

DAVE CHARPTENTIER, CREW CHIEF, No. 15 MENARDS/SYLVANIA CHEVROLET: YOU TESTED WELL EARLIER THIS WEEK AT TALLADEGA. “It gives you something to look forward to going to COT superspeedway races. Looking back, we knew what we had in the past with the current car when we were really good at Talladega and Daytona. We kind of took in consideration the differences between the COT and the current car and tried to build the COT to act the same way on the racetrack.” COMMENT ON THE ADJUSTMENTS YOU MADE TO THE CAR DURING THE SESSION. “NASCAR kind of gave us a script, so to speak, to follow. They told us to show up with a one-inch plate and a one-inch wicker on the back, which is how we showed up. And we started out making single-car runs the morning of the first day and the car was even good in single-car runs. We went to drafting practice and these cars have more downforce and a lot of grip so when they got in the draft the speed pickup, the difference between the single-car run and drafting run is bigger than it is with the current car. So they picked up a lot of speed in the draft and NASCAR, considering the fact that it was in the 90s track conditions were about as bad as they were going to get, figured they needed to slow us down a little more. First we tried an inch-and-a quarter wicker and that changed the aero-balance and did slow the cars down significantly but it also changed the aero-balance, so instead we went to a smaller plate, a 31/32 plate and backed it with a one-inch wicker and that obviously slowed the car down. They were a little bit worse throttle-response and a little more dependent on having other cars around them to help them but that got the speeds in the area that NASCAR was happy with them without changing the aero-balance too dramatically.” IN THE PAST YOU COULD TAKE A CAR BACK TO THE SHOP AND MAKE MAJOR CHANGES. CAN YOU DO THAT WITH THE COT? “No. You follow an inspection process when they put the grid on the car there’s hard points that have to touch. There’s no tolerance. It’s not that you can be red or yellow or blue. In the old days, believe it or not, except for a few exceptions like the spoiler area and the deck lid, the same templates were supposed to fit your Martinsville car that fit your Talladega car. It’s all about how you use the tolerances which varied anywhere from an eighth of an inch to a half an inch. So when you go a half inch one way versus another and you do that to the whole car, that’s why the speedway cars are so dramatically different than a downforce car. But now, everything’s got to fit, essentially, like a glove. So there’s almost no difference between a Talladega car and a Bristol car. In fact, we didn’t do this but a lot of teams brought their Bristol or Martinsville cars to Talladega just to see how they ran relative to a purpose-built speedway car. In fact, the only difference for us is we didn’t take time to put brake ducts on our speedway stuff.” WHAT CAN YOU DO BACK AT THE SHOP TO MAKE THE CAR BETTER? “Horsepower [smiles]. That’s about it. Rear springs are controlled. They issue you your rear springs, they issue you your rear shocks. Now they have the gauges for where the rear end housing has to be located and the spring location relative to that. So that’s all controlled within 70-thousandths. The only leeway you have is front springs, front shocks, front end settings. There’s nothing you can do with the body, basically, nothing. So it’s going to be about under the hood again and how well a guy works the draft and a little bit of luck, too.” WHAT KIND OF RACE DO YOU THINK WE’LL SEE THERE? “I think it’ll be traditional Talladega. Over 20 years or more you’ve seen from no plates running over 210 miles per hour to restrictor plates to when they first went to the big spoilers to on back and did shark fins on top and the wicker bill on the spoilers to them getting back away from that and now to this car. Along the way it’s always been about the big packs, avoiding the big wreck, not being able to pass without help. They said DEI dominated in the early part of the decade but now Childress is running really good, Hendrick is running really good. The 01 team has really had the field covered for an extended period of time and I think it’ll be the same Talladega race we always see. The cars will look a little different but they’ll still be the big packs and you’ve still got to watch out for the Big One, too.”