NASCAR's 'Car of Tomorrow' -- Safer, Faster, Better

INDIANAPOLIS, July 29, 2007 — -- NASCAR is in the developmental process of building a "Car of Tomorrow" for the Busch Series.

Nextel Cup series director John Darby said there is no timetable on when the car may be put on the track, but said the arrival is "inevitable."

"It took us six years to do the Cup car, so a lot of the resources and R&D won't have to be done on it so we can accelerate it," he said Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Darby said the COT makes more sense for Busch than the Cup from a pure financial situation because more teams likely would take advantage of having to build fewer cars as the COT program allows.

The same COT can be used for all tracks — short, intermediate, superspeedway and road course — whereas separate cars have to be built with the current car. "That series is one that will take advantage of the less inventory part of the deal," Darby said. "For a young Busch team if they had three or four cars they could take to all the tracks that's great for that series."

Darby said he could foresee a situation where the chassis and roll cage assembly of the Cup COT is used with the Busch car with a different body so teams can't use the same cars in both series. "We could make as much difference in the body and aesthetics and aerodynamic differences as we need to," he said.

Team owner Richard Childress said he would like to see the COT, that will be fully implemented into the Cup series next season, developed more before going to Busch.

"I'm not a big fan of it right now," he said. "It's got to go down the road a little bit [in Cup] That COT you do over there would have to be so distinctly different than what this one is. I know the one they're working on now has to be different.

"It would have to be different where a guy couldn't pull out and say, 'Oh, I think I'll run Indianapolis this week.' We'd have 70 cars here."

Click here for more on the Car of Tomorrow.

David Newton covers motorsports for ESPN.com.