For Sprint Cup teams, a testing decision looms

Whenever Eddie Gossage saw a mention on the Internet about a Sprint Cup team testing at a non-Sprint Cup track, the Texas Motor Speedway president would print the item and save it. When he had 22 pages worth, he sent them all in a bundle to the office of NASCAR chairman Brian France.

"Somewhere, somebody is testing every day, at a track that is not doing business with NASCAR," said Gossage, whose facility hosts two Sprint Cup weekends each year. "That makes no sense at all. And what you glean from those tests isn't necessarily applicable to the track. You may be looking at one corner of a racetrack, and applying how you go through that corner to one Cup track. It's far more efficient if you go to the racetrack and test. You can't defend it. NASCAR cannot defend it."

Despite its low profile and mundane nature, testing has become a crucial practice for Sprint Cup teams despite the amount of simulation equipment available. Nothing, it seems, beats practice time on a real racetrack. But in recent years, in an effort to reduce costs and foster more even competition, NASCAR has tightened the rules on testing. Now, there are only a handful of sessions allowed at Sprint Cup facilities each season. This year there are six, at Daytona, Las Vegas, California, Pocono and Charlotte twice. If a team needs work on one of the tracks not included on that very short list, they're out of luck.

So they settle for the next best thing: tracks of similar dimensions or character that don't host Sprint Cup events, a glaring loophole in NASCAR's policy. They use Milwaukee to mimic New Hampshire, Virginia International Raceway as a stand-in for Sonoma or Watkins Glen, Greenville-Pickens in place of Martinsville, or Rockingham as a substitute for Darlington. It's an expensive, exhaustive, and ultimately inconclusive practice. Kurt Busch credited testing at Milwaukee with helping him win Sunday at New Hampshire. But two weeks ago at Sonoma, Jeff Gordon had very different feelings. "After today, I hope we don't test at VIR anymore," he lamented after struggling with his racecar.

It's a situation the teams try to make the best of, exacerbated by the fact that only a limited supply of official race tires are made available for outside tests. But the current policy may change, and dramatically so. In a meeting last weekend at New Hampshire, Sprint Cup series director John Darby asked crew chiefs for ideas on how to revamp the testing policy for next season. Every option was on the table -- including no limits at all. Even though the ultimate decision will be NASCAR's, Darby told the crew chiefs to come up with ideas, and they'd meet again to discuss them in two weeks (read more).

The prospect of unlimited testing sent an audible gasp throughout the meeting room and shock waves throughout the garage. "I think the divorce lawyers in North Carolina are going to get the big hit with us testing as much as we're going to be testing now," Busch said.

His crew chief, Pat Tryson, said unlimited testing would mean every team testing every week. That idea makes some smaller organization shudder. "I don't think you can just open it up where one organization can do 100 different tests," said Mike Brown, chief financial officer at single-car Bill Davis Racing. "That would widen the gap."

It's hard to find anyone who thinks of unlimited testing as a realistic prospect, especially given that it would only raise the expenses NASCAR has worked so hard to cut. So why did NASCAR even bring it up? "I think they throw that out there to see how mad we get and to see what happens," Tryson said. Others point to the closed-door meeting with competitors three weeks ago at Michigan, where drivers and car owners were reportedly asked to put a lid on complaining about the new car, and see this as a way of NASCAR perhaps letting those doing the complaining make their own bed.

"I think they're responding to the drivers' complaints about the [new car], and if there's more testing, there would be fewer complaints," said Geoff Smith, president of five-car Roush Fenway Racing. "So by throwing the concept of unlimited testing onto the drivers and crew chiefs, it makes it look as though we're the ones who are against the testing and not NASCAR, when actually we've not had anything to say about it. As it is, the testing we're doing, we're not using Goodyear tires, we're not going to [Speedway Motorsports Inc.] or [International Speedway Corp.] tracks. But we're finding a way to get the testing done." (Continued)