LAS VEGAS -- For the second consecutive year, Sprint Cup Preseason Thunder testing at Las Vegas Motor Speedway turned into a crash-fest, as eight different cars were terminally wrecked in two days of testing.

With the final two days of Preseason Thunder on tap Thursday and Friday at California Speedway, it created a logistical two-step for some teams -- though 78 percent of the 33 teams contacted in an informal poll said they planned to bring the same cars from Vegas to California regardless.

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Red Bull Racing, Penske Racing and Ganassi Racing were three teams that originally planned to bring cars to Vegas to swap them out, sending one new piece on to California with one of the Vegas testers.

Wrecks involving two of those organizations' drivers affected those plans. Roy McCauley, crew chief for Penske Racing's Ryan Newman, said he wouldn't decide until overnight Tuesday whether to swap out one of their No. 12 Dodges. Teammate Pat Tryson said one of driver Kurt Busch' No. 2 Chargers would definitely be changed.

But Richard Childress Racing veteran Jeff Burton still professed a lot of love Tuesday for the new car, even after becoming the sixth driver to crash when his No. 31 Chevrolet hit the wall in Turn 3.

"I've been real happy, and this [accident] doesn't discourage that," Burton said. "What happened here was somehow or other in our control and it's not a fault of the [new car]. I've been real happy with the test so far, really been happy with the way our car's driven so I'm real encouraged that this is going to work well."

The reason for Burton's optimism was that, unlike Regan Smith, Sam Hornish Jr., Dario Franchitti, David Ragan and Mark Martin; Burton appeared to be the victim of a mechanical failure less than an hour into Tuesday morning's practice.

"Something happened with the right front suspension -- we don't know what, because everything's tore up," Burton said. "But just before [Turn 3], the right front hit the racetrack real hard [and] then it wouldn't turn; so there was no warning, just something broke -- we had some kind of a failure somewhere."

It was a portent of bad things to come, as later in the day both Tony Stewart and Michael Waltrip crashed due to mechanical failures. Fittingly, the test ended 10 minutes early when an oil line came loose on Jeff Gordon's No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, ruining too much of the racing surface to allow it to be cleaned in daylight.

"It was no big deal -- didn't hurt anything," said Steve Letarte, Gordon's crew chief. "Actually, that was our plan, so no one could run any faster [laughing]. It was because of all the [computer telemetry] systems."

It wasn't a joke for Stewart's crew chief, Greg Zipadelli, whose West Coast test fleet was cut in half after a device mounted on their No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota apparently failed, causing its right front wheel to leave the car, sending it into the wall.

"We had a wheel force transducer on there, which is in the load cell probe that holds the wheel on there, so it had nothing to do with a wheel, [lug nuts] or normal stuff," Zipadelli said. "It was a part, I'm going to say that we just had from Toyota and we were trying to collect some data. The load cell failed and we've got a wrecked racecar."

Zipadelli said the wreck would have only a slight impact on his test plan.

Sam Hornish Jr. found the wall.

"My intentions were to spend one day [in California] and work on both cars," Zipadelli said. "We had a little bit of a test plan, but now I'm only going to work on the primary car, which was the car we had here. That car that we wrecked was going to be our backup for Vegas and California.

"I've already called back to the shop. I'm not going to say we're behind on cars -- we were in good shape until we wrecked that one. So I just ordered a new one and we'll have it built before we [need it]. We just moved some things around and we'll be OK.

"It will put us a little bit behind because that was a really good racecar. It was brand new and they both ran the same speed, so I was kinda encouraged by that."

A year ago, when the former "standard" cars came to Las Vegas for this test -- their first on a reconfigured track with relatively new pavement -- a flood of eight accidents plagued the high-speed layout. Five of them came on the test's first day.

A year later, the Vegas test was the first widespread carnage of new cars in testing, and again, five wrecks occurred on Monday -- when temperatures in the 40s and wind gusts estimated at more than 50 mph raised havoc atop haulers and on the racetrack.

Rookie of the year candidate Smith was the first to crash, when he said he made an error on his third lap on the track.

"I just messed up -- I didn't expect the car to snap like it did -- but if it makes a better story, say it was the wind," Smith said, smiling and saying he'd heard of 70 mph gusts. "I got sideways and it was really late in the corner -- I was almost on the straightaway when it snapped sideways on me, off of [Turn] 2.

"I almost had the wheel pointed straight and then it went sideways. I went to correct it and over-corrected and turned the right side back into the wall. I hate that it happened so early-on, but we're here testing, also. These guys work their butts off and build me great racecars, they'll fix it up and life goes on."

After practice resumed Monday afternoon following a couple rain delays, three accidents in quick succession heavily damaged the cars of Hornish, Franchitti and Ragan.

Neither of the first two drivers, both stock car newcomers after championship-winning Indy car careers, blamed the weather or conditions, but their crew chiefs told a different tale.

Hornish's Penske Racing crew chief, Chris Carrier, told a story of almost cartoon-like proportion, if he hadn't been contemplating how to replace the three-time Indy Racing League champion's wrecked No. 77 Dodge.

"Sam's pretty quiet, pretty low-key," Carrier said. "And he didn't say anything about the wind being the cause. But me and Matt Gimbel were on top of the hauler grabbing onto our scoring monitor and cover. I've been in 50 mph gusts before and that was at least that.

"I looked out at the racetrack and our car was spinning out -- so I blamed the wind."

Ganassi Racing crew chief Steven Lane agreed about the wreck that eliminated one of his and Franchitti's No. 40 Dodges.

"We just weren't sure what happened, and neither was Dario," Lane said. "But when we looked at the data, it showed us that [Franchitti] crashed before he even began to turn the wheel, so we feel like it had to be the wind."

Ragan's crew chief, Jimmy Fennig, said he had freed up his driver's car and the loose condition resulted in the crash. Fennig said he had nothing to replace the car with for the three remaining days of testing -- one at Vegas and two more this week at California Speedway -- so his test plan would be a lot more conservative, "so we don't end up with nothing to test."

In the most bitter irony in recent memory, Martin's crash occurred in the garage area, when he drove his No. 8B Dale Earnhardt Inc. Chevrolet into a three-and-a-half-foot tall red pole guarding one of the fire plugs sprinkled throughout LVMS's garage.

The crash apparently occurred when the flat bed that brought Ragan's car -- the No. 6 Roush Fenway Racing Ford that Martin drove for nearly 20 years -- parked partly in the travel lane on a corner of the garage.

"Mark said he was driving around the corner and trying to stay away from the flat bed," Martin's crew chief, Tony Gibson said. "The sun was in his eyes and he never saw the pole. He called me on the radio and said 'I just wrecked.'

"I couldn't believe it, because we had just seen Mark come off the racetrack. I'll tell you this -- he was devastated for the rest of the day."

DEI originally planned to bring replacement cars west, but DEI's chief of engineering, Dave Charpentier, said that plan was nixed in consideration of three days of travel time to get it done and what the teams could accomplish with the cars they had.

But if California's test is anything like Vegas' it will magnify the concerns raised about the new car's ability to be returned to service when it's damaged.

RCR driver Clint Bowyer's crew chief Gil Martin smiled as he looked at one of his No. 07 Chevrolet Impalas that was decidedly scruffy looking on the right side.

"That thing looks like it's been in a demolition derby," Martin said, laughing. "One of those wind gusts Monday just caught [Bowyer] out, going down the backstretch and put him in the wall. Luckily he didn't hit very hard."

If he had, Martin said the outcome would have been dire.

"The car that Jeff [Burton] crashed is junk -- it'll be easier to replace it than it would be to put it back together," Martin said. "Anyone who thinks these cars will be able to take a beating better than the [standard cars] is kidding themselves.

"With the [chassis] recertification process and the tolerances we have to meet, it's easier and cheaper to just build a new one than to go to the effort of repairing one."

Burton was relieved that the better of his two test cars was spared, but he admitted he was splitting hairs.

"The other car is a better car," Burton said. "There's nothing wrong -- well, there was nothing wrong with this [wrecked] car -- but we're behind with having cars ready because we've been doing so much development work that we don't have a lot of stuff in production.

"So we can't afford to be wrecking racecars."

That was the feeling at Michael Waltrip Racing when, with less than half an hour remaining in the test, a suspension part failed and propelled the team's owner/driver into the wall.

"It had a part failure, a lower A-frame failed," MWR competition director Bobby Kennedy said. "It's happened quite a few times -- it happened to Bobby Labonte last year and Dave Blaney had that same A-frame problem in qualifying at Atlanta -- so it's not uncommon, but it's certainly something we've got to look at because it's an in-house part."

Kennedy said pairs of Camrys for David Reutimann [No. 00] and Dale Jarrett [No. 44] would go to California, along with Waltrip's single remaining No. 55 Toyota. The No. 32 MWR Toyota that Michael McDowell tested at Las Vegas was not planned to be run at California.

McDowell is scheduled to test the No. 44 on Friday at California, when Jarrett has another commitment.

"We were geared-up, in case we had a problem [Monday] to have another car ready for California," Kennedy said. "But then it happened today and there's not enough time to do that."