Nationwide to debut new car at Daytona in July '10

MONTREAL -- Nationwide Series director Joe Balash said Friday at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve that the new car for will make its debut at Daytona next July -- with the tapered spacer in use at other tracks replacing the traditional restrictor plate currently in use at Daytona and Talladega.

"We actually had meetings a few weeks back with some of our owners in the series to finalize our thoughts moving forward and got a lot of good feedback from them in regard to the types of tracks they would like us to get some experience with, and also some input on the rules package," Balash said.

"Later on that day we had a meeting with the fabricators that will actually build the cars, and we released to them the rulebook to build the new Nationwide car and some thoughts of what we would do at a Talladega test [after the Nov. 1 Cup race there] to finalize the gearing and the tapered spacer that we've used -- our plans are to stop using the restrictor plates and start using the tapered spacer at all events with the new Nationwide car. ...

"It looks like our first race [with the new car] is going to be the July Daytona event, and then we'll do a race about once a month after that for the next three months. We'll have four events in 2010. We still have to finalize a couple of things on the overall schedule before we can announce what tracks we'll be on, but our goal is to race the new car once a month for four months, and then we'll stay away from that last month with the last three races leading into the championship."