FORT WORTH, Texas This sudden trend of team owners trying to sign up wealthy, nonracing business partners seems to be taking stock-car racing into dangerous waters. It flies in the face of Brian France's push toward making the sport more accessible to potential new owners. It also holds the potential for upsetting the balance of power on several fronts, possibly even in Daytona.

Teams owners such as Jack Roush, Ray Evernham, Robert Yates and even Richard Petty might find it necessary to sign with rich, outside-the-racetrack business partners to keep making a go of it in an increasingly expensive sport. But the France family has always preferred dealing with owners who are racers such as Junior Johnson, Chip Ganassi, Roger Penske, Richard Childress and who understand how the family likes the game played, how to go along to get along.

Outsiders? Well, think George Steinbrenner. And sweat.

The Frances should be worried about wealthy, business-savvy outsiders jumping in because it appears to show that NASCAR's current run of cost-cutting rules might not be working, at least not in the way intended.

Although many rules have been put in with the ostensible goal of containing costs and opening up NASCAR racing to new owners, some are now charging that many of the rules are working directly against those goals. Among those rules and changes: the Car of Tomorrow, testing limits, limits on any testing at all with Goodyear tires, testing limits on rookies, even the guarantee to the top 35 of a spot in each race.

Consider the plight of the new Team Red Bull and of Michael Waltrip's new team. Even with heavy-duty money and technology, both have had enormous troubles and might well be sinking.

The Car of Tomorrow is effectively making rich teams richer and hurting smaller teams, because it requires big expenditures of time and engineering resources. On top of that, car owners are now starting to worry seriously about what they can do with these cars of today as NASCAR makes them obsolete. There is simply no racing market available for them, unless someone was to create a new racing series.

One top Cup team just sold two very nice Sonoma road-racing machines for a paltry $21,000 a penny on the dollar. And then consider the 400-strong inventory of current machinery in team garages.

Throw in NASCAR's OK of a new Chevrolet engine and the threat of a new, expensive (and essentially senseless) technology war on that front by Ford and Dodge and it's clear that the price of racing is only going up. Stock-car engines make close to 900 horsepower, yet these teams and drivers could do just as well, probably better even, with only 600 horsepower.

Single-team owners and two-team owners, the few that remain, are in trouble. Anyone even thinking about getting into this sport might now take a hard second look.

And if DaimlerChrysler's selloff of its Chrysler division were to lead to a major cut in Dodge support on the stock-car tour, then the Frances could be looking at nearly a dozen teams suddenly needing expensive, high-tech advice and parts to stay viable. "This sport is not user-friendly to single-team owners," said one top crew chief, asking not to be named. "If it weren't for my boss' checkbook, we couldn't survive. This sport has become dominated by owners with four teams; that's the only way you can make it."

Robbie Loomis is the general manager for Petty Enterprises a still-struggling two-car operation and he said that NASCAR's testing limits have outlived their usefulness and that they make it more difficult for teams to bring in new, young drivers. Kyle Petty plans to cut back his schedule this summer and turn his car over to a younger driver, possibly Jon Wood, for a few races.

But NASCAR's current testing limits make learning the ropes quite tough. First, NASCAR won't let teams have any "real" Goodyears for testing, so teams are having to make side deals with Hoosier, BF Goodrich, maybe even Bridgestone, to get tires for testing. Second, NASCAR lets Nextel Cup teams test at only seven of the tour's 23 tracks and then only once each season. That makes it extremely difficult for new drivers such as A.J. Allmendinger, David Ragan and Regan Smith to learn, and extremely difficult for new teams like Waltrip's and Dietrich Mateschitz's Team Red Bull to get up and running.

Of course, from a practical viewpoint for the Frances who own the majority of tracks opening up tour tracks to more testing might provide a needed burst of publicity at some struggling speedways. Why there is no testing at Darlington is a big question inside several teams.

Even Roush, who is at the high end of the spectrum with five teams, says that many of NASCAR's cost-cutting rules have become counterproductive. Roush terms NASCAR's testing limits "a debacle."

Roush said those rules, taken as a whole, "have punished the lower half of the field, and made it as hard as the upper half of the field can bear.

"It's just a miserable situation."