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."

Yet NASCAR officials say a new approach to testing almost certainly would have come about even without the new car, given how much teams are testing on non-Sprint Cup tracks.

"Today you can go to Milwaukee, and work real hard for two days to try to simulate being at New Hampshire, and if all of your correlation of data is right, and if all your wisdom and educated guesses are correct, it could potentially help you in New Hampshire," Darby said. "Is that the right way to do it? I don't know. Maybe the right way to do it is to test at New Hampshire for a New Hampshire race."

That idea makes perfect sense, and has almost universal support. "We should test at the racetracks we race on," Busch said, echoing a sentiment heard throughout the garage -- and in the offices of Sprint Cup racetrack executives, who see more testing as a way to promote their events and ultimately put on a better show.

"What I want is ... to further develop these cars," Gossage said. "These are going to be fine racecars in time, but they're not fully developed. The only way to fix that is to give them more development time. And a couple of hours of practice and qualifying and then you run a race, that's not helping. We're not paying millions of dollars, and fans aren't paying millions of dollars in admissions, to watch a three-hour, 500-mile test session. They want to see a race."

Of course, more tests at Sprint Cup tracks would theoretically mean more money for Sprint Cup track operators, too. At many outside tracks like the one in Lakeland, Fla., all the teams participating typically split the facility's rental costs, which Brown said can be several thousand dollars a day. Compare that to an official, full-field Sprint Cup test at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where Brown said the track charged organizations $4,000 per team per day. Gossage said testing at his Texas facility is a break-even proposition. But then again, in a world with more Sprint Cup testing, will those track rental fees remain the same?

"It's hard to say right now how aggressive SMI and ISC are going to be as far as track fees, and what the Goodyear tire costs will be," Smith said, referring to the sport's two largest racetrack companies and official tire supplier. "All the other costs are about the same, preparing your car, traveling it down the road. But where you save money is, if you have to drive to Lakeland to do your Martinsville test, the pure miles you drive, the hotels, more per diem allowances and that sort of thing. You could come out ahead. But I wouldn't anticipate that this is some great cost-savings scenario."

The trick to all this, of course, is how to implement it. The smaller teams in the Sprint Cup garage are understandably edgy about what kind of testing policy they're going to get. Unlimited testing would clearly place them further behind, something the sanctioning body cannot let happen. Even a more limited policy would hurt if NASCAR restricted testing by car and not by organization, allowing a team like Hendrick Motorsports to test four times for every Bill Davis Racing's one. Brown has an idea: one team, one test. If Jeff Gordon goes to Talladega, that counts for Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jimmie Johnson, too -- anything more than that could swamp his sponsor-strapped organization.

But even smaller teams seem to support testing on the tracks they race on, an idea that makes too much sense not to happen, and if implemented fairly could give some of the have-nots more of a chance of being competitive. Tracks outside the Sprint Cup circuit can certainly use the money from testing fees, and are surely going to take a financial hit. But if NASCAR and its teams are ever going to see eye-to-eye on the new car, a subject of endless friction and duress, then a more liberal testing policy is a necessity.

"There are some things that can be done there to control the costs," Brown said. "And really, you have airplanes, you have travel, you have hotels, you have all those things involved regardless of where you're going. So if we're going to do it, and everybody does it, let's go places that will help the competition be better."

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer