At this point in the 2008 championship battle, Del Worsham is open to any and all suggestions, even if they are out of the normal. The latest suggestion no longer has him seeing red, but rather black and white.

Although other teams have recently gone to a bare carbon fiber shell with minimal vinyl logos in an effort to save weight, Worsham and his team are taking a different approach and are doing so for a different reason, and most of them will agree it's simply superstitious.    Rather than adhere the vinyl panels to a car painted in a base coat of red, Worsham has devised a new "look" for his car's vinyl that is based solely on shades of gray, and those sheets of vinyl have then been applied to the bare shell.  The reason?  The current red and white design has not won a race since it became the official design for the team in 2006, yet this particular body has a win under its belt, when it was covered in K&N Filters colors earlier this season in Houston. At this point in the 2008 championship battle, Del Worsham is open to any and all suggestions, even if they are out of the normal. The latest suggestion no longer has him seeing red, but rather black and white.

Although other teams have recently gone to a bare carbon fiber shell with minimal vinyl logos in an effort to save weight, Worsham and his team are taking a different approach and are doing so for a different reason, and most of them will agree it's simply superstitious.    Rather than adhere the vinyl panels to a car painted in a base coat of red, Worsham has devised a new "look" for his car's vinyl that is based solely on shades of gray, and those sheets of vinyl have then been applied to the bare shell.  The reason?  The current red and white design has not won a race since it became the official design for the team in 2006, yet this particular body has a win under its belt, when it was covered in K&N Filters colors earlier this season in Houston.

"The guys are convinced our regular red car can't win, and I have to admit I'm not far behind them on that theory, for whatever reason," Worsham said.  "We've done pretty well with the special-edition cars, and we even tried running one of our blue CSK cars for a while this year, so we think it's time to retire the red car and do something different.  We were thinking of the options, and the whole concept of what our car would look like on an old black & white TV came to mind.  Why not start with a black car, and then adjust the vinyl so wherever we had previously faded from light red, to dark red, and then to black, we'll instead fade from light gray, to dark gray, to black.   The object is create the exact same design, but in a total stealth way.

"In reality, this has a lot to do with the fact we like this body a lot more, and it's in a lot better shape than our red CSK car.  We really didn't have the time or the desire to paint it, after Sonoma when the Techron vinyl came off, so I was looking at it and kind of came up with the monochrome look out of nowhere.  By not painting it, we get to save some money, which is just as important as weight these days, and we get to tweak the red out of the car just in case.  Who knows if that red design was just plain unlucky, but I'm not going to argue.  Now we have a black and gray car that may look pretty wild, but we know it's a winning body and we think we can win rounds with it.   At this stage, the bigger question is 'Why not?'   The CSK guys told us to go for it, and my crew loves the idea of getting the red out, so let's try it."

Worsham refers to his new theme as "monochrome". The new scheme evidently worked as he thundered to a  strong 4.152 to land 4th on the chart in session two.  His run broke up what might have been a 1 through 4 procession of Force cars, as he sneaked in between Robert Hight (3rd) and Mike Neff (5th) while Ashley and John Force finished No. 1 and No. 2 respectively.

"The new black monochrome car is bad, and it looks even better when it's out in the sun and on the car, with a our black wheels," Worsham said.  "You never know when a good idea and a good computer rendering are going to look as good in real life or look ridiculous, but this car is just plain cool looking.  Everybody thinks it's looks great, and I know one place where it would look the best, with lots of photographers in front of it and our whole crew behind it.

"On the first run, we saw car after car smoke the tires, and all the crew chiefs on all the teams were scrambling back to change the set-ups after they saw the guys ahead of them.  Because of that, each pair seemed to make it a little bit farther, and by the time we ran we had pushed the power out about as far as we thought we could, and made it down there past where anyone else had gone.  You just knew, though, that our run was the one that would show the rest of the crew chiefs what was out there, so we ended up 5th but that was pretty good, because it put us farther back in the line tonight.   We weren't sure how brave to be, right up until Ashley Force ran a 4.11 a couple pairs ahead of us, in our lane, so we put it back to the aggressive set-up and it went right down there.  The lap itself was just beautiful; pretty much right down the middle."