I don’t know if anyone else has seen “The Pentagon Wars”, but to me it was a precursor of what the Car of Tomorrow has become. The movie is a farce about the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle (Tank). It goes into great detail of how the Pentagon continued to change, modify and irritate everyone involved with development with a continually moving target. In the end, they spent billions (with a “B”) on development before congress finally had to step in and mandate that the job be completed and made safe.

Sounds quite familiar huh? NASCAR, if you’re going to mandate this, make sure you don’t turn this into a joke. You have already spent 7 years on this project, with input from Brett Bodine. You should have had much more input from current race teams who are in the trenches every day. Make sure you get this right the first time out. Bristol was a nice test, but let’s see what it really does at Talledega or Daytona. It scares me that it reduced the overall speed by 5 MPH at the slowest racetrack out there. So what is it going to do at the superspeedways, or tracks like Atlanta or Charlotte.

Not only that, but the costs of this project are costing millions to billions (with a “B”) collectively to all of the car owners. Rick Hendrick did everything he could to just avoid the question in the press conference after Busch’s win at Bristol. You can hear his waffle back and forth at NASCAR.com, “What’s the COST of the COT? Nobody’s saying”. So overall it’s looking a lot like the “The Pentagon Wars” all over again.

In the end I hope this works out for you guys. I’m not sure that competition will be better or not, but whatever you do, don’t waffle. Make it work. Make it affordable. Make it great. Otherwise you are just going to do the exact opposite of what you are trying to do…lose your loyal fanbase.