NASCAR Betting - Car of Tomorrow?
by BetUS Staff
Two races in, and NASCAR drivers still don’t know what to make of the Car of Tomorrow.
The universal car certainly hasn’t turned the Nextel Cup circuit upside-down. Hendrick Motorsports continues to dominate; Kyle Busch won the Food City 500 at Bristol, then Jimmie Johnson beat Jeff Gordon the following week at the Goody’s Cool Orange 500, the latest sponsorship incarnation at Martinsville Speedway’s spring race.
Johnson now trails Gordon by 60 points in the Cup standings, despite winning three events to Gordon’s goose egg. Busch is another 102 points behind Johnson.
If anything, the COT has served to entrench the old world order – at least on shorter tracks. The new car has proven more difficult to handle when driven in a pack, due to a relative lack of downforce known as “aero push.” Passing is that much harder in close confines as a result.
“We’re wasting our time even trying to comment on the Car of Tomorrow at Martinsville and Bristol,” Gordon told ESPN. “You can’t tell anything really about this car right now until we go to [larger] race tracks.”
How about 1.5 miles? That’s how long Texas Motor Speedway is, and that’s the site of the next Cup event, the Samsung 500 on April 15. But this is not a COT race; the drivers will be back in their usual cars until the week after in Phoenix. And, since that’s a one-mile track, drivers expect the May 12 race at Darlington (held over 1.37 miles) to be the true test of how the COT will change the Cup landscape.
Not that you’ll find Johnson complaining. He’s done just fine at Fort Worth in the standard stock car. Out of seven races, Johnson has finished in the Top 10 on six occasions, the other being an 11th-place result.
Texas is similar in structure to the tracks at Atlanta and Charlotte. Johnson won the Kobalt Tools 500 at Altanta on Mar. 15, and his success at Lowe’s Motor Speedway speaks for itself: five checkered flags, a pair of seconds and a third in his last eight races there, dating back to 2003.
Johnson will at least have Gordon to contend with, however. The COT’s design also made it harder for Gordon to bump and run his teammate out of first place at Martinsville. You can rest assured, there will be plenty of contact with the “old” cars if he gets a second crack at Johnson in Texas.
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