Nextel Cup teams are going through the car of tomorrow inspection process slowly today [Thursday] at Bristol Motor Speedway. And what is good today might not be good in the future. NASCAR is trying to work with the teams and educate them about the car, said Nextel Cup Series Director John Darby, and that education could mean giving teams some wiggle room if they are off on a template that would have no bearing on the high-banked concrete half-mile track this weekend at Bristol. That’s why NASCAR opened the garage a day early. About eight of the 50 [49] cars entered were through the templates and scales after nearly three hours of inspection Thursday as part of the first car of tomorrow weekend. From start to finish, it was taking 80-90 minutes for a car to go through the templates and scales before getting the engine and safety inspections done while teams are working on their cars in the pit stalls. “We don’t relax on our safety inspection and we don’t relax on the things that are competitively driven, but if a guy has got a template here that is a 16th [of an inch] off that the whole world knows is not going to make a difference at all when it’s out on the race track, we’ll let them work toward getting it right [in the future],” Darby said Friday about two hours into the inspection process. Teams are going underneath the big claw-looking master template for the first time under real “race” conditions. In the past, templates were placed on the car one at a time. Now many of those templates are in one, big interlocking template. When the cars go through the initial template inspection, they don’t have wings on them. NASCAR issues the wings after the cars are through that section. One of the big parts of the learning process is how much a car changes from week to week and if a piece moves or gets bent whether it will be illegal the following week.(SceneDaily.com)(3-23-2007)
