Evernham needs a break, but NASCAR needs him (cont'd)

Say what you want about his personal life or his ego, but there's no denying that people like Evernham are the soul of the sport. His is the kind of success story NASCAR was built upon -- a car nut who moved down from New Jersey, became the best crew chief of the modern era, and started a race team that within four years boasted a legitimate championship threat. This is the guy who perfected the use of former college and pro athletes as over-the-wall pit crew members, who built the infamous T-Rex car that was so out of whack that inspectors banned it forever, who opened an engine technology center in England, who served as mentor to two-time championship crew chief Chad Knaus, who just a year ago talked of a day when robotics would be used to built racecars.

People like that, who have grand visions and the talent to put them into practice, do not grow on trees. But they succeed partially because of the punishing pace at which they drive themselves, a pace that makes burnout -- or, perhaps more accurately, a disenchantment of the kind Evernham suffered -- almost an inevitability. Rick Hendrick goes fishing in the Caribbean. Richard Childress hunts sheep in Mongolia. Jack Roush plays with airplanes. To Evernham, the cars are everything. He is the rare car owner who knows every intimate detail of the vehicles themselves, a fact that was at once his greatest weakness and greatest strength.

"He is very smart. He can see the future," said his former boss Hendrick, whose counsel Evernham sought before selling majority interest in his team to Gillett. "He could see Toyota in here and a lot of the money that was involved in some of these teams, and he had an opportunity to get someone involved and probably take some off the table. He knows that he's smart enough that he can start all over again. He built that one, he can build another one. He can help anybody if he decides he wants to do it. He's learned a lot about business the hard way. It's the only way to learn it, to experience it. He's done it. I don't know of anybody who could pull off what he pulled off. I don't know if I could do it."

Now it seems he just wants to play the old crew chief's role again, to tinker with the automobiles, to leave operational issues to other people and focus on recapturing the performance that escaped Evernham cars last year. Toward the end of last season, a campaign that saw drivers Kasey Kahne and Elliott Sadler finish 19th and 25th in points, respectively, the greatest crew chief mind since Dale Inman was, astonishingly, hardly even involved with the cars at all. There were too many other things to deal with, and those distractions of ownership were painfully evident every Sunday afternoon on the racetrack.

"I had plenty of ideas last year that I could get started on, and I could never finish them," he said. "I had ideas that I thought could help us last year, but I could never get to go to Kentucky and work through it with the guys for a couple of days, because I had too much I had to do. There was too much going on. In realty, by backing off, it's going to allow a bigger percentage of the time I have on the racecars."

And Sadler, for one, welcomes that. "I think Ray's job is to go to whatever he thinks is struggling and say, guys, this is what I would do, or, this is what I think. I think not having a title lets him go do that. One good thing about it is, it's all on the competition side. It's not going to meet with sponsors, it's not going to sign autographs somewhere for whoever, it's competition-related all the time. Yes, Ray does not have a title. He's trying to help this race team in spots, wherever they may be."

Ultimately, that's where Evernham belongs -- under the hood with a wrench and a flashlight, making cars go faster, doing what makes him happiest. Because for all the talk about declining television ratings and attendance, the day NASCAR truly needs to examine itself in the mirror is the day when talented people like Ray Evernham get frustrated enough to walk away.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.