Doug Hewitt's Thoughts on 1998

On Derrike Cope

"The thing about Derrike is that he has driven several cars over his career, including the Grand Prix, Thunderbird, and Monte Carlo. He has already gone through the learning transition. He's already won in the sport, and he knows what he has to do to win again. It takes a while to learn these cars, and I think Derrike's experience is going to pay off for us at Bahari' Racing."

On the challenges of the new chassis program

"It's going to be a challenge, because we have to learn the cars and learn the chassis. On the positive side, Derrike has driven Steve Leavitt's cars before, and he likes them. We will use the baseline from what we have done here at Bahari' in the past with the Hopkins cars and what Steve has already done. Then we will go and test the new chassis and just start learning as much as we can. Right now I think we plan to race our new chassis at Martinsville, if not before. It's exciting. I think we are going to have a lot of fun this year."

On the differences in the new chassis

"These cars will be structurally different. We can make an educated guess on chassis set-ups compared to what we had. The new chassis's geometry is not a lot different from what we are used to, but structurally these cars are stiffer in a lot of areas."

On the advantages of the new chassis

"The chassis set-up is a little different. The weight is lowered, and the center of gravity is lowered. Lowering the center of gravity basically helps the handling of the car. The car will be a lot easier for us to work with because of the weight and where the weight is placed. The biggest reason we are building our own chassis is the consistency. Every piece we make here is exactly the same, so we don't go from one Gumout Pontiac to another and have every little thing different. If we make a change on one car we know that change is likely to work on any of our cars. That is a big advantage."