He left not wanting to comment, I’m not sure why. Many have speculated but I will wait for his answer. :)
I think I know but.......
Drivers thoughts on the COT.........
Jr~
“I could see the leaders almost the whole race, and it was like we all were just out there running the exact same lap times. It was a parade. I was bored. No one could pass anybody else - we were all equal it seemed. No one has really figured out how to make the Car of Tomorrow turn in the center of the corners- and we struggled with that all night. For us, it was push, push, push... plow, plow, plow... (Teammate) Martin (Truex Jr.) could put his front tires down on the apron to make his car turn, but I never even came close. My car wouldn’t even look down there. I was asking it to - ‘c’mon! Just get me to the apron. Just give me a peak...’ but I couldn’t get it to cooperate.
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Denny Hamlin~ was able to pass a lot of cars at Phoenix after getting a speeding penalty that forced him to restart at the end of the longest line on a restart on lap 103. But Hamlin still said passing was too difficult.
“You know, it’s hard for me to complain, and people will say, ‘But you went from the back to the front,’” Hamlin said. “But, yeah, it took us 300 laps to do it when it shouldn’t have. Our car was just that much better than everyone else’s. It shouldn’t have taken that long.”
Part of the problem: The lack of front downforce.
“These cars have half as much front downforce,” Hamlin said. “So the car already doesn’t have front grip. Then you have a car that’s punching a bigger hole in front of it, that means even less air gets to the front end.
“There were instances out there where I would be a half a second faster than a guy. I would get within 10 car lengths and automatically be slower. And that was just really frustrating. As a driver, you know, there’s just not a whole lot we can do as drivers. We’re at the mercy of track position right now.”
Biffle~
Biffle wasn’t optimistic the car could be improved, either.
“The thing is, there’s only so much you can do,” Biffle said. “We’re painted inside this box and we can only do so much. We’ve only got so much travel, and then we’re solid on the bump stop, so we have to manipulate how we hit that bump stop, how it works, and how we get our front bar.
“What it does, it gets down in the corner, and slides the tires. You can see: Everybody’s doing the same thing. Everybody’s juke, juke, juking the throttle, to try and turn it with the back, and then scrape off the corner, and that’s all we did all night. I’m sure if we would’ve gotten track position, we would’ve just stayed right there.”
Stremme~
“You go in the corner and you try to stop from wrecking and the splitter is dragging the ground and you can’t stop,” Stremme said. “The 6 just spun and there was nothing I could do. I was on the brakes, but it was just a mess.”
And finally a quote from Mark Martin “We’re like our soldiers, we never give up”