Jarrett contends he can contend as 50-year-old (cont'd)

"There is absolutely nothing that I can't do at 50 inside the racecar that keeps me from competing with these guys anywhere that we go," Jarrett said. "There is just nothing there. I keep myself in better physical condition than I was at 30 and 35, myself, and there is no reason that I can't.

"Not to lay it off, but none of us are any better than the equipment that we are given."

Jarrett was critical of RYR's lack of an engineering presence in recent years. He won't have that issue at Michael Waltrip Racing and if NASCAR is correct, Jarrett's ageless theory will be put to the test when the Car of Tomorrow is implemented.

NASCAR claims that the Car of Tomorrow will put more emphasis on the driver, and Jarrett says he is physically up to the task. He plans to keep driving until Nov. 2008, when he turns 52.

"Obviously this is a sport where you can be successful at a much later age than what other athletes can do," Jarrett said. "If you get the right equipment, you can continue to do this for awhile. Hopefully I can represent myself and everyone over 50 in a good way."

Jarrett still is trying to recover fully from a wreck in the closing laps at Sonoma this past summer. Jarrett received the worst end of the Talladega-style crash, which fractured his left hand.

NASCAR's week-to-week scheduling prevented the hand from properly healing, and Jarrett drove in pain for much of the second half. The hand might have healed quickly had Jarrett been able to rest it for a couple of weeks. Because of NASCAR's constant racing, he simply aggravated the injury every Sunday.

Even Jarrett's passion for playing golf on the weekdays with his father, Ned, had to be put on hold because he couldn't properly grip the club.

Jarrett elected to have offseason surgery, but he still couldn't play golf, even as North Carolina was blessed with constant 65-degree days in December.

"I still can't grip the golf club like I want to," Jarrett said. "I love to compete and that is one of the ways I get out and do that. It is just fun to me and it is a little bit of a release.

"We had the mildest winter in North Carolina in 190 years or something, and I was sitting at home and couldn't play golf but I caught up on a lot of things around the house and spent a lot of time with the kids."

Even after the surgery, the hand still throbbed during the first two days of preseason testing at Daytona. By the third day, Jarrett said, the pain went away.

"The doctor said it would be a two-month process in getting back to the golf course but I went back to driving a racecar," Jarrett said. "You're going to shock it a little there and it may take more time healing.

"I can drive the racecar, and it took a couple of days at Daytona at testing and it was pretty sore. By the third day, all of that was gone."

Jarrett knows that he will have to be pain-free this season, which he figures to be among the toughest of his 20-year career. MWR's three-car team enters the year without much guarantee of even qualifying for the field every week.

"The task here is huge. Starting a two-car team would have been large enough, jumping into three certainly made us have to look at things a lot differently," Jarrett said. "It couldn't have been a more difficult and tougher time in this sport to be bringing something like this."

It was speculated that Jarrett signed with Toyota for the paycheck -- some reports claimed he was receiving $10 million a year -- but Jarrett says that he could have walked straight into a lucrative television deal, as Darrell Waltrip did.

"I didn't take this job to log two more years," Jarrett said. "I could have gone and done some TV work. It is hard to see from the driver's seat [that] sometimes that you think your skills are still there, and they are."