Race teams are like family. You hear it all the time.

So what happens when someone in the family needs to go -- and happens to be real family, as in the father of a Cup driver?

“

It was very difficult at times for my dad and I to have a father-son relationship at the race track versus a competitive relationship at the race track.

”

-- RYAN NEWMAN

Well, Ryan Newman had to make the difficult decision -- actually, he says it was more of a mutual one between him and his father, Greg -- to let the family member go, so Greg Newman was replaced as spotter for Newman by Jimmy Kitchens in the offseason. Kitchens, who drove in the Nationwide Series between 1994 and 2005, will make his Cup debut with the team during Saturday's Budweiser Shootout at Daytona International Speedway.

"It was very difficult at times for my dad and I to have a father-son relationship at the race track versus a competitive relationship at the race track," Newman said.

There are no hard feelings, according to Ryan. Now Greg Newman can go back to doing what he does best at the race track: being a supportive father.

The move merely illustrates the fine line drivers must walk with their teams when it comes to making sure communication on the track is as productive as it needs to be. The changes along those lines for Newman's team started long before last season was even over, as driver and crew chief Tony Gibson came to realize they all were a little too high-strung for their own good during races early on.

"It was a tough situation because with my dad spotting and Tony being the crew chief, I only had two people I could vent to," Newman said. "Those were the only two people that I could talk to, or who talked to me, on a given race.

"So if it got heated, my only options were to vent to one or both of them. My dad could vent to someone there on the spotter stand or Gibson could look over at the engineer and say, 'What the hell is he talking about?' But for me, those were the only two guys I could talk to. Somebody's got to stay calm, among the three of us."

Gibson and Newman said as last season progressed they decided precisely that -- and if they had to designate someone to stay calm on a weekend-by-weekend or race-by-race basis, that's what they would do. It worked well enough that Newman made the Chase and finished a respectable ninth in points during their first year together at Stewart-Haas Racing.

"We were like, hey, it's tough out there. We've all gotta work together. There are times when we're going to yell at each other and cuss at each other and scream at each other and want to kick [each other], but in the end we've got to be as constructive in our criticism as we can in order to be successful," Newman said.

"That was one of the changing moments as far as our communication last year -- not because I'm that bad of a person who always wants to yell and scream and kick, but because in the end the level of constructive criticism that you can have, or the level of communication that you have, can dictate your success on a given day."

Gibson said eventually the focus on staying calm had to be narrowed to between himself and his driver. They found it wasn't productive for both of them to be angry at the same time -- or at least not to express that to each other.

"I think we both got frustrated," Gibson said. "We finally sat down and said, 'Look, one of us has got to stay calm. We're going through some rough times and having some bad luck, but one of us has got to stay calm.' So after we did that, that's kind of how we worked it. If we were having a bad day, we just had to pick it. I would be like, 'Today's your day to stay calm.' Or he would say that to me. That seemed to help a lot."

Although Newman made the Chase and performed fairly consistently, he failed to win a race and hasn't reached Victory Lane since capturing the Daytona 500 in 2008. That was 71 races ago.

Gibson said improving the communication between driver and crew chief isn't the only issue he hopes will help change that in 2010. He pointed out that since the start of last season, virtually every member of the pit crew has been changed to a new position or replaced altogether.

He added that Newman has become increasingly more involved in helping determine the car's setup, and that he as a crew chief has become more in tune with the adjustments that work best for his driver during an event. And that, of course, comes right back to that improved level of communication.

"I like his input. Me and him will sit down that night practice or qualifying -- good, bad or whatever -- and we'll spend a good two or three hours going over the day and how we're going to approach the next day," Gibson said.

"Being able to communicate is key. If we both get mad and frustrated and clam up, we're not going to be able to get anything done. ... I think him knowing that we're not giving up, that we're giving him everything we can even when things might not be going exactly like either one of us like, is very important."

So is building a team that's like a family, even when sometimes real family has to be cut out of the loop.