Evernham taking a break but won't rule out a return

MOORESVILLE, N.C. -- After 30 years of running at full speed nearly every waking hour of every day, Ray Evernham is ready to take a rest.

Everything is relative, of course. That doesn't mean he won't stay busy.

Looking ahead

For the first time in decades, Ray Evernham finds himself out of NASCAR. Now he begins a new chapter which includes spending more time with his teenage son and a greater attention to short-track racing.

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The former Cup Series champion crew chief and car owner will serve as a network television analyst. He also recently purchased East Lincoln Speedway -- a three-eighths-mile dirt track located in Lincoln County, N.C.; and is helping promote a class of four-cylinder speedsters that he hopes to make affordable and safer for young drivers looking to start out on dirt or pavement.

Oh, and there is the little project he has going with professional drag-race driver Doug Herbert. Evernham and Herbert are building a behemoth that they hope to take to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah this August, where Herbert plans to make a run at the land speed record of 500 miles per hour for a piston-driven car.

But what really keeps Evernham cooking these days is the museum/shop he's putting together in Mooresville. It's located in between the city of Charlotte and the Statesville, N.C., shop where he so recently used to put in long hours as the head of Evernham Motorsports and later, to a lesser degree, at what became Gillett Evernham Motorsports.

Evernham met with some media types at the home of Ray Evernham Enterprises on Tuesday, where he looked back on his years as a crew chief and owner in the Cup Series and looked forward to what may lie ahead. But first, he made it very clear that he's taking a break from the competitive side of the Cup wars.

"I know that at some point, I'm going to have to step back into something that's highly competitive," Evernham said. "But I want to make sure I'm rested and refreshed when I do that -- because I don't feel like I was using my brain as much as I should have been for the last couple of years."

Evernham sold controlling interest in his Cup operation to the family of George Gillett two summers ago. It wasn't long thereafter that he began staying away from Cup races more frequently -- and as time went on, he became less and less involved with the race teams he helped found when Dodge made its return to racing with him in 2000. (Continued)