But Biffle found himself together with Dr. Dale Carrison late in the afternoon on the opening day of the final session of Jackson Hewitt Preseason Thunder when a cut right-front tire sent his No. 16 Ford hard and flush into the Turn 2 wall.

"We're changing around a bunch of front suspension stuff -- like everybody here is," Biffle said. "We changed the spindle combination and unfortunately, it looks like the sway-bar arm rubbed a hole in the sidewall of the tire and it went flat.

"That happens a lot in this sport. It's an inch-and-a-half away from the sidewall of that tire [sitting still in the garage], so that's a long way for that tire to deflect [under stress in the corners] to get over there, and then to rub a hole in it, besides.

"That had to happen at maximum deflection. So now, all of our cars are making sure they have plenty of clearance. It was something that hadn't hit all day, we just changed the spindle combination and it was enough to make a difference."

The wreck was scarily similar to one Biffle suffered Dec. 7 near the same spot, but nowhere near as severe, he said. Biffle took a ride to the infield care center, where a life-flight helicopter sat outside, before he was examined and quickly released to return to the garage .

"It was pretty hard -- a pretty good hit," Biffle said. "But it was nothing compared to [the one in December]. My shoulder was sore already, but I'm fine."

At the Goodyear tire test nearly two months ago, Biffle suffered a dislocated right shoulder and was briefly knocked unconscious when a tire deflated and sent him into the wall between Turns 1 and 2 of the high-speed 1.5-mile racetrack, whose banks in the turns were reconfigured to 20 degrees midway through last season.

A minor controversy arose following the December crash after Biffle declined to be transported to a local hospital after a track safety crew took him back to his Roush Racing hauler and gave him a perfunctory examination.

Biffle said Monday at the lunch break that he had had "a good discussion" with Dr. Carrison, the track's director of safety whose full-time job is head of the trauma department at University Medical Center in Las Vegas, as well as some of his staff, including the crew that responded to his December crash, to resolve some misunderstandings that arose through media reports after the incident.

"I think we both were enlightened on exactly what we did wrong, what we did right and what we could do better and I think it was informative to both of us," Biffle said. "They're armed with information about how they might do it different, I think they learned a lot about what happened, and they may come up with some different policies."

Las Vegas Motor Speedway president Chris Powell fully supported his crews and procedures when the controversy erupted earlier this month during a Preseason Thunder session at Daytona International Speedway, and hadn't much changed his tune Monday afternoon.

"I've been given what I consider to be a good report and I'm satisfied that our people did what they should have done," Powell said. "[Biffle] had some concerns about what our people did and he now sees it from a different perspective, we can see it from his perspective and we had a good exchange of ideas."

Biffle said he hoped it might spark changes across the board at other facilities, both for tests and regular events.

"Absolutely, because I think it was a wake-up call for all of us, all the way across the board," Biffle said. "We had a big team meeting about it, the drivers, all the crew chiefs and Jack [Roush] -- and he puts it on the crew chief's responsibility at the track [saying], 'You're in charge of the team, you're in charge of that driver and the cars, the travel -- you're in charge.'

"He basically told them to intervene and armed the crew chiefs with better knowledge of what we're doing."

The incidents clouded what appeared to start out as a decent test day for Biffle, who won the last series race on a 1.5-mile track, the Ford 400 finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, but lost that car in the December wreck.

"We have a brand-new car and we have that secondary car [from December] and they're both danged near on top of each other on speed, so I'm real, real happy" Biffle said at lunch. Afterward, with the right side of his painted car flattened from back to front, it was a severe drawing-board session for the one he had left for the final day of this test on Tuesday.

"They both were driving extremely well and we were happy with the lap times we were running," Biffle said. "We feel like we're right there in the hunt.

"But what it feels like, right now, is that laps two, three, four, five and six are slowing down a little faster than we want to, and we're not really able to maintain that speed, so that's what we're working on. That's really the only thing that we're working on, because we feel like we have plenty of speed -- we're just trying to get that longevity."

Biffle once again bemoaned the fact that the car he wrecked, with which he won three consecutive Homestead finales and a number of other races, was very fast and very consistent -- though he wasn't sure that was totally a good thing.

"It would do what those two cars [at the test] won't do," Biffle said. "It would run its fast lap, every lap -- and that's probably why that right-front tire failed, because that car was able to maintain that speed with no drop-off.

"I'm not a tire guy or anything like that, but at Atlanta and all those [fast] places like that, we have falloff -- you run fast and then the car starts to slow down. That's what we need, whether it's with the [tire] compounds or the track surfaces or the downforce we're making.

"The cars run the same speed every stinking lap and that's what makes it very difficult on the tires to take that abuse."

Biffle said Goodyear had taken his right-front tire from the test back to its factory and was having a hard time determining if it had worn out, been punctured or deflated for another reason.