Martinsville Speedway is hosting an important test today to see if NASCAR can run on short ovals in damp conditions.

Although NASCAR is willing to run in many conditions, wet is not one of them. Not on ovals anyway. Brendan Gaughan, told NBC Sports why in 2014.

“You can’t on [a wet] oval, period. That’d be asinine and dumb,” Gaughan said. “You just can’t do it. There’s no rain line on an oval course.”

Ovals simply don’t operate the same way as road courses. From drainage issues to rubber issues, to the danger of sliding into the wall, NASCAR does not run on ovals in the rain. And although that’s not set to change, the strength of its hydrophobia may ease.

NASCAR’s wet weather test will seek to find out if races can be run in drying or damp conditions, rather than in the rain, according to Steve O’Donnell, the sport’s chief racing development officer.

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“I think the overall goal is anything we can do to speed up the drying process, regardless of the technology, to allow us to get back to racing more quickly is a benefit to the fans,” O’Donnell said. “We’re always trying to innovate, and you saw that with what we’ve done around the track-drying system and that’s worked out well. We’ve always looked at what’s the next iteration.”

Despite running on a wet oval being “asinine and dumb,” NASCAR has run in wet conditions since 2008. Rain tires made their competition debut in Montreal that year in the Xfinity series, but the top-flight Cup Series didn’t run wet tires until last season.

These have strictly been for road courses, but the existence of wet tires will be useful for this test.

“We want this to be safe, so that will be part of this test — talking to the drivers, what are they comfortable with — then obviously talking to Goodyear and (director of racing) Greg Stucker and his team about how they feel and how the tire performs, what if any tweaks we could make to that tire coming out of Martinsville, so there’s a lot that we’re hoping to learn here in terms of grip levels,” said O’Donnell.

The test will be driven by Kyle Larson and Chris Buescher at the 0.526-mile track. It will require a lot of analysis, but if the results are good, O’Donnell says it’s something the sport would like to implement as quickly as possible.

And although the timing of this test coincides with April Fools, O’Donnell is insistent that this is no prank.

“It just happens to fall on April Fools’ Day. You can’t make that up,” O’Donnell says with a laugh. “But no, this is a real thing and a real test, and we’ll be happy to report back April 2nd on how it went.”

Based on how insistent officials have been about selling pranks, though, we might wait until after the results are in to be fully 100% certain that this wasn’t a joke.