[caption id="attachment_2253" align="alignleft" width="150"] Cody Dinsmore[/caption]

When we left off last week, Bill Elliott was at one of the biggest times of the year - winning 11 races and 11 poles in 1985 in addition to the $1,000,000 bonus from series sponsor, Winston. He was also named Most Popular Driver for the second consecutive year and Eljer's Driver of the Year. Sure, it was an awesome year for a guy who had just been racing the full schedule for his 3rd season, but a heart-breaking part failure at the season finale at Riverside cost him that year's Winston Cup. Still looking optimistic for 1986, the Elliott's now were trying to worry about a championship. Their mind-set for the previous years were to just win races. In 1985, that's exactly what they done. Now they were going to be more smarter about how they run. The only thing was...the other manufacturers. On the 1985 schedule, there were 28 races - 14 were won by Fords, the other 14 had Chevrolet's in victory lane. Notice there were no Oldsmobile wins, nor Buick or Pontiac. Therefore, GM had to do something to keep up with the aerodynamic wonders of the Thunderbird. For the 1986 models of the Chevrolet Monte Carlo and the Pontiac Grand Prix were basically the same as the previous year, but with a huge 'bubble-back' glass. The front end was also changed to make the cars more aerodynamic. For the other 2 GM products, Buick, and Olds , cars were radically re-designed and looked much smaller than the others. Many teams switched to the smaller-looking cars to experiment.