If nothing otherwise from NASCAR’s Labor Day weekend trip to Auto Club Speedway in southern California is a positive, at smallest the sanctioning body is taking steps to make the sport safer in the coming weeks.

NASCAR CEO Brian France announced Sunday at the track that NASCAR will be unveiling a new mix with drugs testing policy in the coming weeks that will likely take effect at the time that the 2009 season begins at Daytona in February.NASCAR officials have approached divers teams in newly come weeks, using them as sonorous boards on ideas for the new policy. A form of random testing is expected, members of several team sources have confirmed.

“We will be looking at broadening testing, even though we have a lot of latitude today. We’re going to make broad it. The circumstances around all of sports have changed in the past three, four or five years. We need to be mindful of that.”That stance is a long way from the one NASCAR originally took earlier this season when former driver Aaron Fike admitted that he used heroin on race days.
who was arrested in June 2007 after getting caught with the drug outside the King’s Island amusement park in Ohio — admitted to his use for the time of an ESPN the Magazine conference.

NASCAR’s original response was that its drug testing program of testing drivers and team members who show signs of using drugs was sufficient enough — despite the performance that it in no degree once suspected Fike. Naturally, NASCAR took quite a bit of flack from the incident, but didn’t make at all major changes.

While the changes they appear to be making with a view to 2009 are other thing than a little delayed — driver Kevin Harvick already has instituted a random testing policy among the race teams he owns — the changes are at least coming.