“Flat-washer” or “Unisteel” testing is a well-known technique applied to the basic selection of aircraft bearing materials and their heat treatment prior to, or as an alternative to, full-scale testing. Over the last decade, the continuous decrease of the development cycle time has constrained the aerospace bearing industry to revise its testing means. A simple, rapid, and reproducible test to assess material performance is then crucial, and many testing developments have been made. A history of this elemental screening method is presented to highlight its virtues and its shortcomings. The conclusions of these past developments have been used to design an enhanced version of this material test method called the multicontact test (MCT). A performance comparison is made with previously presented devices to bring out the discriminating power of the MCT concept and its capacity to obtain a statistically significant quantity of data relatively quickly and economically. A typical study is described in this paper to illustrate the performance of the MCT. The study shows the influence of the hardness change of a powder-metallurgy steel on rolling contact fatigue life.