COT At Phoenix Flunks Again

I read some blogs about the COT at Phoenix and was struck that some people thought this past Arizona 500k was a good race. Of course we also had the laughable line from the RSM that "the disaster expected by some drivers didn't come to pass," as though they expected a big pile of crashes.

"You just couldn't go anywhere," Kyle Petty noted after the race. This sums up the reality that first showed in track testing of the COT and continued in the Bristol and Martinsville races, where cars were climbing the banking of Bristol just to get turning and Jeff Gordon was so tight that Jimmie Johnson was daring him to stick his car into the gap underneath him and Jeff Gordon could not get a fender alongside. Contrast that with Martinsville races such as Jeff Burton and Bobby Hamilton in 1997 when they were nose to nose for the lead for five straight laps in the final 20 laps, Hamilton and John Andretti nose to nose for the lead for ten straight laps in 1998, and Andretti battling Jeff Burton nose to nose for five straight laps in the final ten in 1999.

There was some side-by-side racing in spots at Phoenix, but those were so few and far between that they were the exceptions proving the rule. The much-ballyhooed finish came about because of two things - another late-race yellow saving NASCAR's competitive bacon, and a group of cars on the tail-end of the lead lap fighting to keep Jeff Gordon from lapping them. This allowed Tony Stewart to make a bold charge up the middle into a temporary lead, but once Jeff Gordon retook it a lap later he was gone.

Some have pointed to Denny Hamlin clawing through the field after his pit speeding penalty. Most races see a car starting in the bottom passing much of the field under green - Jeff Burton quietly did that to win at New Hampshire in 1999; the niftiest such charge I've seen was John Andretti passing 22 cars in 100 laps at NHIS in 2000; Kyle Petty passed 22 cars at Pocono in 2003 before blowing up; Johnny Sauter at Phoenix passed a lot of cars, and so did Bobby Labonte.

That we see a car or two doing this is common to races; other than that, the field pretty much stayed where all the cars were in track position. Most were tight to at least some extent all weekend again - three times the COT has raced, and all three times the tautology of the garage area was "tight, tight, tight."

It seems that at least part of the reason some like the COT is something a Sporting News blogger wrote - "they're not the aero mutants of before." To defend the COT by referring to the flush-airdam/spoilered cars it ostensibly will replace as aero mutants is hysterical. Those "aero mutants" are the natural result of the evolution of aerodynamics. This COT is the mutant, a hybrid car/Truck with an Indycar wing and a grotesque gap in the front airdam.

The story has circulated that a substantial nose change may be in the pipeline for the COT - if it happens it will be the beginning of the transmutation of the COT back to the flush-airdam/spoilered "mutant" of before, because that "mutant" is what you get from aerodynamic evolution. Of course I'm not giving up on the potential that the COT, universally unpopular in the sport, will wear out its welcome even with a sanctioning body that has lately been chronically short of realworld racing sense.

Richmond and Darlington will get the COT mutant next, and given the uncompetitive racing we saw in the three events run previously, the COT is bound to fail at those tracks, too.

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