The holiday season culminates with the Christmas and New Year's Day holidays each year. It is a time of year to which a lot of people look forward. For the NASCAR community, the holidays equate to the opportunity to enjoy a little time off during the days between Christmas and New Year's Day. The break is well deserved as teams have been in the throes of building new cars for the upcoming NASCAR test sessions and race season.
Each year teams deal with the challenges of preparing new cars for a new season which typically consists of adjustments to NASCAR rules changes and/or manufacturer adjustments to their respective models. The rule change that has had the most immediate impact has been the transition to the Car of Tomorrow for the entire upcoming NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season.
As soon as the 2007 season finished, team started the process of preparing new cars for the season. Part of that process was stripping the old body-style of cars raced in NASCAR competition of materials that could be used in the Car of Tomorrow (COT).
"We spent a week or two just removing drive trains, fuel cells, brakes and driver seats from all of the old cars," said Greg Osborne, car chief of the #44 UPS Racing Team. "Those are items that fit and work in the new cars so that has been somewhat of a help in our preparations."
Once the old cars were stripped the process shifted toward unloading that product to make room for the new cars being built.
"We're actually trying to sell our old cars but so is every other team on the circuit," Osborne said. "We've sold a few cars to some ARCA teams but that's probably about the only place we'll be able to sell these types of cars."
The process for preparing cars for the 2008 season started in late November despite NASCAR rules not being finalized until late December. Fortunately for Team UPS, they discovered they were pretty close to the guidelines NASCAR mandated for the new cars.
"We had to go back and change a few things but we were pretty close to what NASCAR wanted," Osborne explained. "We have built some intermediate track cars but our focus now shifts heavily to the speedway cars."
Each of the three Michael Waltrip Racing teams has two speedway cars with a third car for each team in the works. While the work load has been great, Osborne said it has been easier preparing for the 2008 season than it was preparing for the 2007 season.
"It really hasn't been a thrash," he said. "It's been steady work but not an all out thrash. The biggest thing for this year is that we have enough personnel to carry the load whereas last year we were still hiring people and putting people in place on top of having to prepare cars for the season so in that respect we're in pretty good shape."
