Mayfield working on 'big' sponsor deal, seeking ride (cont'd)

"Hopefully, somebody out there will take me in and put all of this behind us and go forward. Nobody [team owners] will talk to you right now and when you've got Ramsey making statements like they're not going to let me back on the track, everybody's afraid to put me in a car, afraid to get blackballed, which again is unfair to the team and me and everybody.

"I've tried hard and the only way I'm going to be able to get back in is to find somebody that believes in me that will put the money up to go forward and hopefully, somebody will accept that and we'll put all this behind us."

He repeated an earlier assertion that his Mayfield Motorsports team, which was created in January 2009, would probably not reappear. Most of his employees were laid off in early June, about a week after his team attempted to qualify May 24 at Lowe's Motor Speedway, the last race the No. 41 appeared, with J.J. Yeley as its driver.

Mayfield's team manager, Bobby Wooten, its last remaining employee, resigned last week as Mayfield tries to execute selling his equipment to someone he only said was "currently involved in motorsports."

"He stayed on to try to help me sell it or hopefully put something back together, but it didn't look good, so he had to do what he had to do, and we left on good terms," Mayfield said of Wooten. "I haven't talked to him in the last few days, but I'm sure he'll find something, because he's a good guy.

"Me selling my own team doesn't matter [to his hoped-for sponsorship], I need to [sell] anyway because I don't need to be a driver/owner -- I did that to get back into the picture, here, to hopefully get a ride. We're still in the process of trying to close the deal with a guy to sell the assets of it. When you've got a big sponsorship, you can pretty much go wherever you want to go.

"It's just better off for me to go and drive for one of the bigger teams that's already established and has got good motors and all that stuff already."

Until Mayfield's Tuesday filing, NASCAR had questioned the legitimacy of Mayfield's testing trail, which is just the latest in the "he said, they said" aspect of the case.

"When you look at 15 tests, since May 1, why are they all negative for methamphetamine, except two [done by Aegis Science's] Dr. David Black?" Mayfield said. "The test that was done [July 6] 30 minutes after theirs, was [analyzed] even more than Aegis tests, to make sure, because we weren't going to say we weren't testing the same way they were.

"We haven't shown our whole hand yet, but I can promise you that we're not going to go get tested and not be the same way, or better than what Aegis tests."

"There are no organizations with drug-testing programs that recognize or accept test results from an individual who has tested positive and then self tests by choosing the date, the time and the circumstances for the sample collection and self test," Dr. Black has said previously.

Mayfield refuted that when speaking of his actions on July 6, when NASCAR delivered a test request to Mayfield's voice mail. Mayfield had one test done on that afternoon as he tried to find NASCAR's requested lab then and, after NASCAR drug testers came to his home in the evening, he went and was tested again.

"It wasn't my time and it wasn't my lab of choice -- I went straight to the emergency room and trust me, I had better things I wanted to do that night than go to the emergency room and go get tested again," Mayfield said. "So I didn't have a choice of what lab I went to. I went to the most credible lab in the United States, if that makes you feel any better."