Nascar drivers turned lap after lap Thursday - seeing how much rubber they left on the track. This was a tire test, ever more important in 2009, because Nascar is saving money by forbidding race teams from testing cars on their own time.
Nascar driver Kurt Busch said, “I feel like these days are far and few between and when you can get ‘em, you better hold onto ‘em and maximize a testing day.”
The no-testing rule could slow the big money teams down, and bring them back to the pack.
Travis Kvapil’s Ford ran without a major sponsor for much of 2008. “We just didn’t have the budget a year ago to be able to fly guys during the week and get hotel rooms and pay for tires and the engines and things like that,” he said.
Kvapil said some small deals have been put together, and other sponsors have expressed interested in being involved, but “nobody wants to make a decision. Nobody wants to make that commitment.”
Still, Kvapil said the team is better position that it was to start last season.
“Last year at this time, we had absolutely zero sponsors, and not getting any return calls,” he said. “A lot has changed in a year for us. Hopefully we’ll go out and run competitively early and it will come together like it did for us last year.”
The testing ban is a cost-cutting measure designed to help teams save millions of dollars this season, when a tough economy has tightened budgets and made sponsorship money extremely difficult for teams to find.
| 
|