(There’s a photo on the linked story, so you can get a glimpse of the thing if you haven’t seen it already. When I get back to the office, I’ll try to get a different photo up.)

The Scene Daily story quoted NASCAR’s vice president of competition, Robin Pemberton, as saying that the chassis remain different so that teams won’t be able to apply setups to their Cup cars.

That’s an admirable goal, of course, and one that makes a lot of business sense. The Nationwide series is an important property to NASCAR, and it wouldn’t be smart of them to simply turn the thing into a Sprint Cup Lite.

But the million-dollar question – and if you’ve made it this far, it’s probably already flashed across your mind – is this: Is the quality of Nationwide racing going to be affected?

The COT started off hot in the Cup series, with several close and competitive races during its initial rollout in 2007. But since then (and particularly this year, with the COT in full-time use), the racing quality has gradually degraded. The aerodynamics are such that the car is hard to turn and more problematic for the drivers, who may be less prone to make a daring move that we’ll remember.

That’s if they’re even in a position to make a move for the lead. We’ve seen time and again – and drivers have complained time and again – that while in the lead, the car runs great. If you’re trying to catch the leader, however, you can make a certain amount of progress before the car just stops catching up. And that says nothing of the manufacturers, who will now be even more frustrated that their Cup and Nationwide teams look exactly like every other car on the track.

The idea of COT racing is one that NASCAR cannot ignore. You listen to the drivers, you read the anecdotes, and there are not a lot of people happy about the COT and what it’s brought to the sport. I’ll try to be a glass-half-full kind of guy and say that maybe NASCAR can learn something from the Nationwide COT that could improve racing in the Cup cars.

That’s a lot of maybes. (The unspoken maybe, the biggest one of all, is that NASCAR would use that knowledge to actually improve the Cup cars, which is no guarantee.)

We can only wait and see what happens. Given our collective experience with the Cup COT, I don’t have much hope that this will turn out well, either.

—WE HAVE AN ANTICIPATED day off tomorrow in order to free up time to cover the Washington Redskins’ home opener on Sunday against New Orleans. But we’ll be back Friday (I swear) and we’ll take a look at what Loudon holds in store…