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Jimmie Johnson made his case Sunday night at Auto Club Speedway in California that Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards aren't the only contenders for the 2008 NASCAR Sprint Cup Championship.

And, boy, did he do it in style.

If nothing else from NASCAR's Labor Day weekend trip to Auto Club Speedway in southern California is a positive, at least 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 drug testing policy in the coming weeks that will likely take effect when the 2009 season begins at Daytona in February.

NASCAR officials have approached several teams in recent weeks, using them as sounding boards on ideas for the new policy. A form of random testing is expected, members of several team sources have confirmed.

"We're going to expand the scope of the policy," NASCAR's Brian France said. "That's where we are today. We have a very good policy," he said.

"We will be looking at broadening testing, even though we have a lot of latitude today. We're going to broaden 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.

A.J. Allmendinger has a lot in common with Patrick Carpentier.

Both are former open-wheel racing drivers. Both have struggled at times to get a strong foothold on NASCAR racing.

And both have now been strung along by their race teams, with Carpentier finally getting the word this week that his services aren't a top priority at his Gillette-Evernham Motorsports home. Allmendinger has yet to receive word on his 2009 plans.

Most people in the NASCAR world would have signed Allmendinger a month ago to an extended contract after the driver has shown an obvious improvement in not only finishing races, but qualifying for them, too. But Red Bull Racing isn't like most other teams.

The operation has its NASCAR base in North Carolina, but most of the big personnel decisions -- like hiring a driver -- are handled by the ownership group in Red Bull's native country Austria. And that ownership group is used to the Formula One train of thought when it comes to driver decisions of waiting until September or October to make plans for the following year.

That has got to be frustrating to Allmendinger for many, many reasons -- the least of which is Scott Speed.

Reed Sorenson made his way to Gillette-Evernham Motorsports earlier this week, transferring across Sprint Cup team lines from Chip Ganassi Racing.

And as he did so, rookie Canadian driver Patrick Carpentier in first year with GEM's No. 10 car could read the writing on the wall.

Simply, the team was placing him on the back burner of its sponsorship search -- meaning he more than likely won't be in a sponsored car if he decides to stick with the GEM team in 2009 because the emphasis will now be on Sorenson.

And when he was asked about Friday afternoon at Auto Club Speedway, he didn't exactly toe the company line:

"They hired Reed Sorenson for next year, so it's over," Carpentier says. "They're working on a fourth team and looking for sponsorship, but you know how that goes."

So Carpentier says he's a free agent. "I'm talking with other teams to see what's out there," the Montreal native says.

I'd classify what was said by Carpentier as another round of those "you can't blame him"-type comments.

I wrote the other day about how much I disliked the new format NASCAR is going with for the season-opening Budweiser Shootout in 2009 at Daytona, mainly because of the qualification procedure.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. hates the new format for a completely different reason, though:

"I don't know what the extra five laps are for," he said Friday at Auto Club Speedway, site of Sunday's Pepsi 500 Sprint Cup race. "What the heck? They [NASCAR] don't get it. They messed up The Winston, the all-star race, and they're messing up the Shootout.

"They ought to line us up, make us run 10 laps. They want us to run around there for 25 first and have a 25-lap segment? That'd be cool. But 10 laps to go, all or nothing - that's what the fans want, that's what the drivers want.

"The last segment being 50 laps? We're just going to sit there for 30. I just don't get it. They don't get it. I don't understand. I don't know what the focus group is they're talking to to get these formats.

"It's frustrating because I want to like running those races. I don't want to dread them, but right now I'm dreading running them because the formats are no fun."

If Earnhardt Jr. was aiming for a scathing critique of the format, then he was spot on. And can you blame the guy?

NASCAR had to rain on its own parade, but thankfully they didn't induce a downpour.

The sanctioning body placed Sprint Cup point leader Kyle Busch and last Saturday night's winner Carl Edwards on probation Wednesday morning for their post-race antics following the Sharpie 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway:

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (Aug. 27, 2008) – NASCAR announced today that it has placed Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards on probation for the next six races in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, as a result of their on-track incident last Saturday at the conclusion of the race at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Busch, driver of the No. 18 car and Edwards, driver of the No. 99 car, both violated Section 12-4-A (actions detrimental to stock car racing; hitting another competitor's car after the race had concluded) of the 2008 NASCAR rule book.

The probation takes effect beginning with this weekend's event at Auto Club Speedway.

Prior to 2008, the typical penalty for such post-race encounters included a monetary fine and seemed much steeper, but this penalty falls more in line with NASCAR's pledge from the beginning of the season to let the rough side drag a little more in the sport.

And can you blame them? The biggest news from Bristol was Busch & Edwards, not anything else.