Ray Evernham says he will cut back and change his course

HOMESTEAD, Fla. – A few minutes before the final practice session of the 2007 Nextel Cup season begins, Ray Evernham is standing behind Elliott Sadler’s hauler, leaning on a stack of tires.

Over the long, rich history of stock-car racing, a lot of profound and important things have been said by people leaning on a stack of tires. It’s not quite like a confessional booth or a psychiatrist’s couch, but it seems to have a similar affect.

Very early this year, I found Evernham late one afternoon in the garage at Las Vegas and asked him about a man named George Gillett. I’d heard that Gillett was interested in buying a piece of Evernham’s team and wanted to see whether that was true or not.

Some car owners (many of them, truth be told) would have acted like I was speaking Chinese and pretended they knew not of what I was speaking. Publicity might kill a deal, they’d worry.

So they’d either dodge the question or outright lie about it.

Not Evernham. He told me that he and Gillett were talking, that Gillett would be coming to the track that weekend and that he hoped he and Gillett would be able to make a deal.

Several months later, they made that deal. The team was renamed Gillett Evernham Motorsports, and Evernham started telling everybody that meant he was going to have less and less to do with running the team he bought from Bill Elliott. He would, instead, go back to spending more time working on the team’s cars and trying to make them go faster than they have been during what has been a difficult season.

He won three championships by figuring out things like that back when he worked with Jeff Gordon at HendrickMotorsports, and he missed that part of it. What he has found, however, is that not even that has been enough to fill up the hole he has been feeling.

“I am burned out, I guess,” Evernham said. Everybody’s burned out at the end of a long NASCAR season, even a car owner with three teams who hasn’t been able to get one to victory lane after Kasey Kahne won six times last year.

But this is different. This is Ray Evernham, the man who lived and breathed racing when he ran Gordon’s No. 24 team. The man who left that job and started his own team, his own major league sports franchise, and helped Dodge come back into the sport. The man to whom Chad Knaus, who has emerged as the sport’s most highly regarded crew chief while working with Jimmie Johnson, is most often compared.

“I am going to cut way back next year,” he said. How far back? “I don’t know if I will be at more than 10 races next year.”

Evernham glances at his watch. He’s waiting for a telephone call. His father is sick and in the hospital and his mother is upset. Evernham has decided to fly home tonight to be with his parents.

He’s got people to run the teams. Gillett has people who’ll run the business. Evernham will be around, but his plan is to cede control in away that never seemed possible for a man who has always been considered the prototype of a “control freak.”

“I will probably tell them what I think is wrong,” Evernham said.“But I don’t plan on caring whether they listen or not.”

Evernham said he wants to spend more time with his son, Ray Jr. This week, he went to Mexico and watched the Baja 1000. He flew back to South Florida with Robby Gordon and said they talked about the race non-stop for hours.

“Robby’s truck in the Trophy Truck class is an engineering marvel,” Evernham said. “Over there, if I can invent a shock absorber that’s better, there isn’t a rule that says I can’t. Maybe I’ll go work on Robby’s truck next year.”

The point is that right now, Evernham doesn’t know what he wants to do. He doesn’t know whether he’ll miss what he’s doing right now so badly that he’ll come right back.

But he has decided it’s important for to him to find out.