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Sports

Testing, testing: NASCAR puts Generation-6 car through it's paces

By FoxSports
Published | Updated
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So we've pretty much come full circle now with the Generation-6 car in a year's time. NASCAR is holding a test today at Charlotte Motor Speedway working towards the future of improving what I believe to already be a great product. NASCAR has been holding steady on making any changes until they gave the teams enough time to make their own changes.

Now I think they are at that point where NASCAR feels the teams have gone as far as they could and while they are very satisfied with the it, they aren't 100 percent happy with it. So now is the time to start developing or at least start experimenting with multiple cars on the race track to figure out where those changes and improvements might come from.

Obviously the goal is to start the 2014 season with an even better race car than we have now. Naturally they have newer ideas now that they didn't have a year ago or even back to early June or back to April. Now NASCAR wants to take those ideas and experiment to see if any of them will help make the car even more competitive than it already is.

All this is geared toward giving the fans what they want, plus giving the drivers what they want. It will also give Goodyear the data it needs to build a better tire around this race car. Sure, we've been setting new track records all year long and that is phenomenal. Now can some tweaks or improvements make for better racing?

By no stretch of the imagination am I saying it's been a bad year for this new car. It's been far from that, but the moving target always will be can we make the product even better? Historically, the longer we have a certain generation of car, the drivers get happier with it.

So I think it's just a great time to take a look at where things are and experiment to see where things might could go. I know NASCAR has ideas and suggestions they want to try. The drivers and teams also have suggestions that they would like NASCAR to experiment with to see what might come from it.

The ultimate goal in all this is like I mentioned earlier, to make the racing even better in 2014 than it has been in 2013. This test today is the start of trying to make that happen. Today's test is the start to hopefully give the drivers a better chance to pass on the mile and a half or bigger tracks. Where NASCAR and the drivers/teams are right now is this Gen-6 car is really good but the exciting thing is it can actually be even better. That bodes nothing but excitement for the 2014 NASCAR Sprint Cup season.