New role an adjustment, maybe even inevitable, Ray Evernham acknowledges

JENNA FRYER

The Associated Press

Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008

Ray Evernham is still feeling out his role at the race team he built from the ground up, then sold majority ownership of last season.

Now a minority owner of Gillett Evernham Motorsports, he's adjusting to not having to be the first guy at work each morning and the last one to leave at the end of the day.

Now working from home when he wants to, or taking long weekends when he needs to get away, Evernham said his new workload took some getting used to.

"It's hard, but in other ways it was also inevitable," Evernham said Tuesday. "There was no way to continue and have success the way I was going. I would have killed myself or somebody else. It was not a good path."

Evernham said he left New Jersey for North Carolina some 15 years ago set on making it in NASCAR. He went from a guy who could move all of his possessions in the back of a pickup truck to a three-time championship winning crew chief, then parlayed that into team ownership.

But it took a tremendous amount of time and energy, and when Montreal Canadiens owner George Gillett expressed interest in buying his team last season, Evernham was finally ready to scale back.

"I felt like it was time to hand it off," Evernham said. "If I wanted to just run myself out of business, and not do a good job for Dodge and all the people who supported me or I could hand it off and say 'The best thing for me to do is hand off and be part of this and help grow it, rather than try to control it.'"

GEM will field cars this season for Kasey Kahne, Elliott Sadler and Patrick Carpentier.

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