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.

"And on days when we feel like we're not going to win or not even be on the lead lap, I wouldn't be surprised to see us in the future pull in the garage, completely change our setup, go back out and run a few laps -- and kind of just mess around with set-ups and throw away a weekend. I wouldn't be surprised to see us do that in the future."

Hamlin said his team can always fall back to what was working well enough to get them to second in the points standings if none of the experimentation proves fruitful over the next several weeks. In fact, he said he was surprised he didn't struggle more at Chicagoland.

If it sounds like he and his team are willing to take themselves out of the running at certain upcoming events with the hope of learning something that might help them in the future, well, it's a risk vs. reward ratio that Hamlin said he is willing to run, sacrificing in the short term for hopefully a big payoff in the long term.

"I think we can get back to what we were doing before if we have to," Hamlin said. "But we knew -- I talked to [crew chief] Mike [Ford] about it -- and we knew there were going to be days where we were going to run 30th. I'm surprised we didn't [last Sunday]. This was a car that had never been run. It had a body on it that was all twisted around, different from what we had before."

There is one place, however, where Hamlin said his team absolutely will not risk experimenting. That is at Indy, where he desperately wants to win the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard.

"That's one that we're going to all our guns loaded for. We're not going to be experimenting at Indy, for sure," he said. "I think that in the future, things could change in the way that we do things as a race team. But for Indy, specifically, that's one that we definitely want to win and we feel like we can win.

"So we've got to throw all of our eggs in one basket for that. I think you'll see us get back to the basics for Indy."

After that, who knows? Everything the No. 11 team does from that point forward will be geared toward positioning itself better for the Chase. Being second in points affords Hamlin's crew the luxury of doing some major experimentation.

"We feel like we have somewhat of a cushion as far as the Chase is concerned. Because frankly, if we go into the Chase 12th, as long as we're ahead a certain amount of whoever is 13th, it really doesn't matter," Hamlin said. "Yeah, it looks good on paper to be second in points -- but the wins are what matters.

"To put ourselves in position to win more races and be at our best at the end, we're going to have to experiment -- because even the wins aren't going to mean squat if we run terrible in the Chase. And the way that we're going to run better in the Chase is to mess around now and learn what's right and what's wrong for those last 10."