He used to arrive at the race shop before 7 each morning, and remain well past 7 each night. As the team owner, he felt he had to set an example by being the first one there and the last to leave. He could count on a single finger the number of times he had taken more than four consecutive days off in the past 14 years. If he wasn't overseeing every aspect of his organization and wearing more hats than a race winner in Victory Lane, then Ray Evernham didn't feel like he was doing his job.

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It was a crushing level of commitment, one that helped him shepherd a new manufacturer into NASCAR's highest level and win 13 races with the team that bore his name. But over time, it wore him down. The fun drained away. The politics ate at him. The on-track struggles piled up. And so Evernham, who won three Cup championships as Jeff Gordon's crew chief and easily ranks among the smartest men in NASCAR, turned the organization he founded over to other people and stepped away.

While the Sprint Cup tour tested at Daytona International Speedway, Evernham was at the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction in Scottsdale, Ariz., buying a red and white 1955 Chevrolet he had long sought after. When it's delivered, the first thing he's going to do is give his mom and dad a ride. He's going to pursue some ideas in the automotive aftermarket industry, maybe do a little more boxing, and try to rekindle the fire that drove him for so many years,

"I wasn't having fun. I didn't have fun, and it just wasn't because of the performance," Evernham said. "The performance you can get back. There was a lot that went on the last couple of years that kind of took the fun out of it for me, and hopefully I can get that back. I love racing, I've loved racing my whole life. It's been the only thing I've ever been excited about. So some of the fun had gone away, but there are a lot of great people in this sport, and I want to spend time with the great people. Maybe being away from the negative people will help me a little bit."

It's a radical departure for a man whose work ethic was legendary, who for years assumed the roles of car owner, chief executive officer and director of competition at Evernham Motorsports. Last year he sold majority ownership in his organization to George Gillett, the Colorado businessman who also owns the Montreal Canadiens of the NHL. More recently, he hired Tom Reddin of LendingTree as CEO, and promoted vice president Mark McArdle to managing director of competition. Each of those men brought some staff with them. McArdle estimated that it's taking six to eight people to do the jobs Evernham once did all on his own.

"He recognized that he needed to take that step back in order to know how to go forward," McArdle said. "What's the quote, the more you see of the curvature of the earth the higher you fly? So it was a bit more difficult for him to see that earth curvature the way we had him mired in day-to-day operational issues. Really no one appreciates the fact that he was doing the job of owner as well as director of competition. That's an insane work load, even for Ray Evernham. There comes a point in time where that gets to be too much."

He's hoping for a fresher perspective, a recharging of the batteries, the freedom to help with the technical aspect of a race team -- still his first love -- without getting bogged down by operational issues. He's not going to be in there every day, up to his elbows in sponsor contracts and personnel concerns. But he's not going away, either. He's still a co-owner of Gillett Evernham Motorsports, albeit a minority one. He's just throttling back a little, which isn't a bad thing. Because NASCAR can't afford to have smart, imaginative, savvy, enterprising people like Ray Evernham get completely burned out and walk away for good.

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.