Bill Elliott

Bill Elliott and the new Ford FR9 engine will be back in the field at Atlanta this weekend…
After skipping NASCAR’s short West Coast swing, Wood Brothers Racing and driver Bill Elliott will return to the Sprint Cup fray this weekend at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Elliott, of course, is a hero in his native Georgia, where he earned the nickname “Awesome Bill from Dawsonville” for some of his exploits in the 1980s, which including winning a Sprint Cup championship and the old “Winston Million.”

Just as they did last year, the Wood Brothers are only running a partial Sprint Cup schedule. But in each of the races they run, Elliott’s iconic No. 21 Ford Fusion will powered by the new FR9 Ford engine.

The FR9′s main claim to fame is not additional horsepower — these days, NASCAR keeps teams in such a tight mechanical box that no manufacturer can get a meaningful horsepower advantage. But what it does have is a lower center of gravity and an improved cooling system, both of which should contribute to better handling on the track.

All the other Fords at Atlanta — four cars each from Roush Fenway Racing and Richard Petty Motorsports, plus three more from Front Row Motorsports with Yates Racing and one from Latitude 43 Motorsports — will be powered by the old Ford engine, code-named “452.”

Sunday’s race will mark only the second event for the FR9 at a non-restrictor plate track. David Ragan ran it successfully in 2009′s season-ending race at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

By the second half of 2010, the plan is for all the Ford teams to use the new engine. But for now, it’s just the Wood Brothers, who will use it in every race this season. And that arrangement seems to please everyone involved.

“With us running a limited schedule, in the unlikely event something goes wrong, it doesn’t kill us in the points because we’re not really worried about points,” said Len Wood, co-owner of the Wood Brothers team.

For Ford, having the Wood Brothers willing to run the new engine gives the automaker critically needed real-world testing. “They can run them on the endurance dyno all they want, but until you put that thing on the race track under the real deal with tear offs flying around and getting on your grille and heating it up more than you want, or with pit stops where it gets over-revved here or there, it’s never the real deal until you’re really out there,” said Wood.

It also gives Ford the luxury of a gradual engine roll-out schedule — and the other teams the ability to spread out the cost involved.

“There are a couple of reasons for the slow rollout. The first reason is you’ve got to get your race package complete,” said David Simon, a Ford engineer who worked closely with Doug Yates to develop the new engine. “You can’t go out there with an engine that isn’t fully developed, not at this level.”

Besides that, the current engine makes plenty of power as is.

“The old “452” engine, compared to the other engines out there, is really competitive,” said Simon. “I mean, it’s not just hanging on because it’s old, it’s really competitive so we haven’t been under a lot of pressure to roll the new engine out early. With that said, the new engine is at a point where we’re very confident in it.”

Still finalizing the details on the engine requires track time.

“We didn’t want to do development on the race track and continuously be changing it while being under the pressure of racing it,” said Simon. “The other reason is that once you get the package set, you’ve got to get the entire pipeline going. The engine shop has a lot of parts they need to make, and we have parts to supply, so if you do that before your race package is set, you run the risk of having to change things and ending up with a lot of scrap parts. We didn’t want to be in that situation, so that’s why the rollout of this open engine is gonna be a little bit slower.”

Logistics clearly play a factor as well.

“It’s not just as simple as changing out the old engine for the new engine in an hour,” said Wood. “There are different motor mounts in the car for the FR9 and it requires the cable drive fuel pump, which we had never used before until Daytona. The headers are different and some of the radiator connectors are different, so there was a changeover period we went through to get ready.”

With that in mind, the Wood Brothers team is ready for Atlanta.

“I’m excited about it,” said Wood. “We’ve talked about it for over a year now and the time has come to move to the future. … We’re taking a car that we built last fall for Homestead and qualified in the top 10 (ninth) and then we had a pretty decent run in the race and finished 16th. They’ve massaged on that car this winter and they’re building another one just like that to go to Texas, and I actually think it will run at the Charlotte test March 23 and 24.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEEDtv.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.