For Reiser, time was right to move up as Roush GM

HOMESTEAD, Fla. -- He'll deal with five teams now instead of one. He'll move into a new office 40 feet away from the one he currently occupies. To Robbie Reiser, those are the only real differences between his current job as crew chief and his new one as general manager of Roush Fenway Racing.

"Every year for the last couple of years, this has always come up. It just seems like the right time, I guess, if you look at it," Reiser said Saturday at Homestead-Miami Speedway. "I'm concerned at the direction we're going with the [Car of Tomorrow] and how that's going to change the way we build cars and what we're doing. Also, the direction of our company with selling cars to other teams and other team owners is going to change some of our direction. I don't want to be a part of that two years down the road when we're already committed to go a direction, I'd like to get in front of that and help our teams as we build on that."

Reiser has been the crew chief for Roush driver Matt Kenseth since the two came to Roush together in 1999. Close friends from their old short-track days in Wisconsin, they won a championship on NASCAR's top level together in 2003. Reiser's departure opens the door for team engineer Chip Bolin, who led Kenseth to a race win on an interim basis this season, to move on top of the pit box full time. (read more)

And he thinks his old team will do just fine without him.

"This ain't affecting the 17 team," Reiser said. "What's the difference if you're a GM or a crew chief on the 17? You're still involved in the 17, you're still working with it on a day-to-day basis. Maybe if you're doing the daily decisions on everything they've got going on, but it's driven by Roush Fenway, and what they do there is really no different. I don't really know what to say. The 17 has been together so long that all the guys are pretty much at the point where they're full-grown, they can go do what they want to do on this team. So by me coming out of the mold and allowing everybody else to step up a little bit -- they've all been doing the same job for a long time, too -- so it's their opportunity to do a little something different that will make it exciting for them.

"But, like I say, I'm just in front of the building right now, so you can come up and talk to me or do whatever you want. So that's why I don't really think it's all that different than what we've been doing."

Reiser admits, he will miss being at the racetrack every weekend. But his new role as GM will give him more control over the direction of the organization as a whole, and help Roush catch up to the team that's dominated this season -- Hendrick Motorsports, and more specifically the No. 48 car of Jimmie Johnson, who can wrap up his second consecutive Nextel Cup title in Sunday's season finale.

"We've got some things we want to change, but, really, if you look at our company right now, the 48's killing us every weekend," he said. "But other than that, Roush Fenway, with the cars that we've got going right now, is just as strong as anybody in the garage. So to say, hey, we're going to make 1,000 changes? No, we're not going to change a bunch of stuff. We'll work on some stuff internally that we do on a day-to-day basis, the way we prepare for a race, but that's about it."