CONCORD, N.C. -- After 22 wins in 93 races with the wing on his Cup car, one would think maybe Jimmie Johnson is a little nervous about replacing the wing with a spoiler.
Then again, don't forget that he won 28 of 203 races with the spoiler in place before the wing came along -- as well as two of the four consecutive championships he owns. So Johnson isn't really nervous about anything. In fact, he seemed just the opposite as a two-day test with the new spoiler in place wound down Wednesday at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Talladega specs
According to NASCAR vice president Robin Pemberton, the sanctioning body will issue a restrictor plate with openings of 15/16ths inches for the April 25 Aaron's 499 at Talladega Superspeedway.
Those openings are smaller than any tested last week at the 2.66-mile superspeedway.
The rear spoiler at Talladega will measure 63 inches long and a uniform 4.5 inches high. NASCAR chose the small plate, small spoiler combination in response to higher speeds and closing rates observed during last week's test when larger plates were used.
"I'm not really worried," Johnson said. "We're viewing it as an opportunity. We might not be the first team to find the magic that the spoiler wants, but we're usually pretty good at finding stuff in a hurry."
Meanwhile, the driver with the second-most wins of the wing era, Carl Edwards, admitted Wednesday that the two-day test at CMS mostly frustrated him.
"Our test is going lousy, actually," Edwards said during a lunch break in the testing action Wednesday. "We're very slow and it's very frustrating. ... I would love to say that we're really fast and it's going well, but we're learning all the things that aren't working."
Edwards and others admitted that there was only so much they could learn from the two-day test, during which cars never ran in the types of packs that they will be in when an actual race is run.
"We've got to figure out as a team what we're missing," said Edwards, who won 13 races during the wing era but is on a 41-race winless streak. "The good thing that I'm going to lean -on for a little bit of hope is that we're making two, three, five and maybe even 10-lap runs. Once you come back and race here, it becomes a lot different animal.
"We've tested here and been very fast before and then came back and raced terribly, so maybe we're not as bad as it seems."
And maybe Johnson will not be as good as he's been. But while no one is really counting on catching that break, driver David Reutimann did say that he and others are looking at the switch to the spoiler as a possible opportunity to close the gap between their teams and Johnson's.
"Those guys seem to adapt pretty well," Reutimann said. "But all the good teams -- Carl's team and everybody else's -- they're able to adapt as changes come. One thing that's a constant in our sport is that something is always changing, whether it be a tire or a body configuration or a rule or whatever.
"Those guys [on Johnson's No. 48 Chevrolet team] probably feel like they're on top of the world right now anyway and I'm sure they've got a lot of confidence, but I don't think there is any confidence lost on the other guys who also believe in their teams. They might not say it outwardly, but I feel like this is a new opportunity to maybe gain some ground, where before some other teams had an advantage on you."
It will come down to who figures it out best the fastest, he added.
"You've got something now that's completely new and it's kind of a clean sheet of paper for almost everybody," Reutimann said. "We're just going to see who can adapt the quickest, I guess -- although [the 48 team] has been pretty good at that over the last couple of years or however many years it has been. Too long. They adapt quicker, it seems; or do a better job of it, either way."
Perhaps Johnson's Hendrick Motorsports teammate, Dale Earnhardt Jr., summed it up the best.
"We could build the cars a hundred million different ways, and they'd be a top team battling for wins and championships anyways. They're just talented," Earnhardt said.
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Spoiler test 'lousy' Wednesday
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