There's only one driver who has multiple victories at Texas, and it's Jeff Burton. He won the first race held at the track in 1997 and he won again in April this year.

Since then things have been different for Burton. He made the Chase. He's been somewhat consistent. But he hasn't had the finishes he did early in the season.

During a Car of Tomorrow test at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Burton and his team tried to get a grasp on the new machine and admittedly realized they were somewhat behind. He spoke of his thoughts on the COT and on how his Chase has gone in this week's NASCAR teleconference.

Q: Jeff, I'd like you to go back and bring us forward from the time, I guess you had the dubious honor of being the first guy to spin out a Car of Tomorrow here in the test, where that car has come from here to now. And what you and your team have learned in the day and a half you've been here for this test?

Burton: I think the wing has certainly helped a great deal with the stability of the car. Especially around all the cars.

Everybody's pretty much running by themselves like we typically would in a practice. So it's still yet to be determined how good or how bad they're going to be with 43 of them out there.

But from the wing standpoint it's come a long way. There are a lot of little things that have happened since then, but no real big ones as seen by me, other than the wing. And we're still in the exploratory phase at that point, splitter links, all that. They've made a lot of changes, but the wing being the biggest one.

Honestly, in the last day and a half we've learned we've got a lot of work to do. We're behind and we've got four months to get caught up. And it's not because we haven't worked hard. But some other people have just done a better job. We just can't go as fast as we need to go with any of our cars right now. So it's good to know where we are in October and November rather than February. And it's clear we've got some ground to gain.

Q: Can you maybe give a little explanation how much different is the driving behavior between the current Cup car and the COT car?

Burton: As radical as they look, as radically different as they look, they do drive differently, there's no question. But probably not as differently as one would assume.

Typically the struggles that we have with the current car, let's call it, are similar to the struggles we have with the new car. The new car makes overall less grip. It tends to magnify the problem more. But if I read the comments from what I said on Sunday during the race, they're very similar to what I'm seeing today.

It's just in a bigger degree. If we were 30 percent too tight, now we're 50 percent too tight. If we were 30 percent loose, now we're 30 percent too loose.

They just do more of the bad things more of the time and they do it to a worse degree. So they don't drive as good for sure, but not as radically different as the two cars look. (Continued)