In the Field: Elliott Sadler

We've been anticipating being able to announce our owner, Ray Evernham's partnership with the Gillett family, to form Gillett Evernham Motorsports -- which was done on Monday.

I'm really happy about the deal that Ray's been able to put together, because it's going to be able to help our organization, big-time -- because it's going to do a couple of things for us.

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First, it's going to put Ray Evernham in the position of being in charge, and really getting his hands into being involved on a day-to-day basis with the competition side of everything that's going on with all of our race teams, particularly with car development and technology development.

So I think it's going to help us a lot, from that standpoint -- because for the last several years, Ray has spent so much time on the road, meeting with our family of sponsors, and with potential sponsors, trying to find proper funding for our race team.

He never gets to be in the shop to help out and to get involved on the technical side -- and we all know how much Ray loves that aspect of the business, how smart he is in those areas of the sport and the legacy he has, through the three championships he won as Jeff Gordon's crew chief over there at Hendrick.

Now, through his deal with George Gillett and his son, Alex, Ray can get back to what he loves to do, and that's getting his hands on the racecars and working more closely, every day with his team directors and his drivers.

George Gillett coming in definitely brings a lot of resources to the table -- a lot of funding. But even more than that, George and his organization are going to handle everything on the sponsor side of the business.

They know so many people throughout the sports and business world, and at a lot of Fortune 500 companies, I believe that will put us in a position of strength for a long time to come.

Second, the Gillett family is just great people. Both George and Alex have both been A-1 to work with so far -- just great guys -- and we're really looking forward to racing for them.

We've talked about how exciting it's been for me to get Ray up on my box while we were breaking Scott McDougall in as my team director. Well, I can tell you, without a doubt that getting him more involved in the competition side is going to bring us great things.

Ego has nothing to do with creating this partnership and Ray wanting to stay involved in the ownership of the team. He can see pretty clearly the best thing for him to do; and that's one thing about Ray: He doesn't see the need to do this because he's the owner and he built it.

He's seen that we need to grow to get better and we need to expand to be able to compete with Hendrick [Motorsports] and Roush [Racing] and teams like that. And the best way for us to do that is first, to bring in great partners like the Gilletts and second, for Ray to get more involved with the race teams.

That's his strength -- not being on the road five days a week trying to create sponsorship and doing autograph sessions and meet-and-greets and things like that.

Ray's strength lies in being back at the shop, working with the team directors and working with the engineers, studying and getting more ideas going, because he's so innovative, as far as the cars are concerned.

So I feel like it's definitely going to make our team stronger to have him back in the shop, keeping all those guys pointed in the right direction.

And what's even better is that I think we'll see Ray out on the road more getting involved in our test sessions. I know that he wants to do some testing stuff because he misses that and I believe he feels that's one of the reasons the company is down a little bit, is because he hasn't been able to do as much of that as he wants to, with his schedule being so busy.

So he's definitely planning on being more involved in our test program and doing some trips to Kentucky, for example -- and Nashville and Lakeland -- especially with this Car of Tomorrow that we're working so hard to develop, with it coming on full-time for next year.

Ray wants to get going real hard on that, so that when we show up in Daytona for the start of the 2008 season, we'll be in good shape.

We hope getting Ray more involved with the racecars will help not only us with our COT development program, but all the Dodge teams.

That's what we need to do. We've been to meet with the folks from Dodge Motorsports and we've talked to them, to stress that's what we need to do, as much as we can with this COT program because it's new to all of us.

We've got a little way to go before we catch up to the Chevrolets, so we're going to be working hard on that part of it.

But the bottom line is, Ray's just a good leader, and he leads by example. Like I said, his strength, for our company is in doing all this testing and all this car and technological development -- especially with this COT because we're a little bit behind. And right now is when we really need to dig deep and put in some extra resources to get this Car of Tomorrow running like it needs to.

And Ray's a good leader for that. I can see him doing that, because they've already been talking about some new test things and some new cars we're looking at building for 2008 and he's heading that up.

So I'm already starting to see a change, as far as him getting more involved on the car side of it, and we should be able to benefit from that.

Elliott Sadler, now in his ninth full season in the Cup Series, shares weekly with NASCAR.COM readers life on the road through staff writer Dave Rodman.