Hamlin and team to begin experimenting with setups

Shortly after climbing out of his racecar last weekend following the USG Sheetrock 400 at Chicagoland Speedway, a sweaty Denny Hamlin shrugged and threw up his hands.

No, he wasn't thinking or getting ready to talk about Tony Stewart again. He was gesturing about his No. 11 Chevrolet that he fought every inch of the way to a respectable but hardly spectacular 17th-place finish.

"For us," said Hamlin, "we know now what doesn't work."

Well, they know at least some of what doesn't work. Hamlin said that Chicagoland was the beginning of a stretch covering most of the next seven races when his team plans on tweaking everything that they do.

"We had a tough day [at Chicagoland]," Hamlin said. "We said we were going to experiment with our setups at this point of the season, spend the next five or six weeks just messing around, I guess you could say.

"[Last Sunday] was a mediocre day. We were a 10th- to 15th-place car all day. We just could not get a handle on this car. It's never been run before, and the setup was kind of out of the box."

Experiment? At this point of the season?

As ludicrous as it might sound on the surface, Hamlin's team and a handful of others are in a position where they can afford to do precisely that over the next several weeks, with some notable exceptions.

Hamlin is second in the points standings, trailing only Jeff Gordon. But he said his team needs to figure out how to win more races -- and more importantly, how to win the ones that will make up the Chase for the Nextel Cup championship. Those are the last 10 of the season, with the top 12 drivers in points over the first 26 qualifying for the Chase.

There are just seven "regular-season" races left, beginning with the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on July 29. There is no Nextel Cup race this weekend, and many drivers and their teams split for vacations almost as soon as they wrapped up their business at Chicagoland last weekend.

Hamlin's team headed instead for Kentucky Speedway, where they planned some extensive testing. He said he would get around to having a little fun in Miami, Fla., after some more business was addressed.

"We're spending the second half [of the season], really, just experimenting," he said. "We're going to go to Kentucky and play with some things. We feel like our program as a whole was good enough to win the championship the way it was, with some fine-tuning. We're trying to get that fine-tuning now.

"In order to do that, you have to have test time and spend some of these races doing things you wouldn't normally do. Yeah, it's not going to show up great results on race days. But hopefully it will show up at the end of the year."

In other words, while the tests at Kentucky and other tracks like it are helpful, Hamlin insisted that there is no substitute for experimenting under actual race conditions -- even at the risk of finishing terribly on some given days.

"You know, if we are going to get better as a race team, the only way to do that is to experiment during race conditions. You can go out there and you can test here, there and everywhere -- but until you're in race conditions, you don't know really what you've got," Hamlin said. (Continued)