NASCAR Newsmaker

Ryan Newman is ninth in the Chase for the Championship standings. He is 88 points short of sixth-place, which would tie him for his best finish in the Sprint Cup Series standings.

Newman talked about his first season at Stewart-Haas Racing. Here are excerpts of that interview:

Q: Would you like to be an owner/driver?

A: Honestly, that's not one of my goals. Other people have tried even before Tony. So I don't think that that is something that I'm interested in. I know that there are - it's kind of like when things are on a grand scale, when they're good they're great. But when they're bad, they're really bad. And I don't have any will to have those potential bad headaches.

I think Tony's done a great job and Gene Haas as well as far as laying ground work and everything else in the shop. I don't know that you could ever try to repeat that or duplicate that.

Q: What can NASCAR do to keep cars from getting airborne at Talladega?

A: I know they've made one big step and that's to reduce the restrictor plate size to slow the cars down so we're less likely to get airborne. I know the speedway has made improvements with respect to catch fans and things like that. But ultimately we don't want to get to that situation. Realistically, the drivers, as NASCAR has evolved to restrictor plate tracks, have changed the way we drive. There will be times when we single-file out and there will be times when we're four-wide, four-deep for the whole pack at times. And as I said, as NASCAR has evolved, you never know what you're going to get with the drivers and how their styles change.

Q: What will the race be like this Sunday?

A: We'll have the first for double-file restarts. So it will be interesting to see how that plays out. ... I look forward to it. It's a driver's racetrack.We've always said that because it's unique.t's different from one end to the other. And, therefore, the crew chief can only get one end perfect, it seems, and the other one the driver has to adapt to.

Q: What are your expectations for 2010 since this year has been better than you thought?

A: Well, the one thing that I would say for sure is I feel like we should be able to expand upon this season, 2009, and take the relationships that we've built and start building better and faster race cars and things like that, because of the things that we've learned together as a team and what (crew chief) Tony Gibson and I have learned, what he's learned about the way I like to drive a car and the way I learned from things from him and how he likes to adjust on the race car.

Q: Are there changes that should be made to the Car of Tomorrow?

A: Well, I think that there's different ways of looking at that. From a mechanical standpoint, there are things we could do to make the car ride different or be able to adjust to it differently. I haven't been a big fan of the bump stops, but they are a way we tune the race car and they are a way we can create advantages. So they are one thing that's as it's a disadvantage, it's an advantage to be able to have over other teams in what you're doing to make the car ride better. Ideally, we'd not like to have bump starts, we'd have four shocks, go off and make it more simple. When you make it more complex, makes the more understanding teams be more successful. So the second part of it are the aerodynamics of the car: I don't know if they're ideal. I'm not a huge fan of the wing. I think that we'd get more side drafting, have a little bit better side-by-side racing if we had a spoiler on the back of it. I think you'll see a lot of the things we'd ideally have liked to have seen in the Car of Tomorrow for the Cup Series and the Car of Tomorrow for the Nationwide Series in the future based on things that both NASCAR and the teams have learned.