Owner Evernham Is Talk of Daytona With Intrepid

It was 500 days ago that Ray Evernham was given the go-ahead for an improbable task--to build a new Dodge Intrepid race car from scratch in time for the 2001 Daytona 500.

Mission accomplished.

Evernham’s hand-picked driver, a reputedly over-the-hill Bill Elliott, drove one of Evernham Motorsports’ Intrepids 183.565 mph Saturday, faster than any of the Fords, Chevrolets or Pontiacs that have been competing for years at Daytona International Speedway.

Another Dodge, driven by Stacy Compton and owned by Mark Melling, but part of the 10-car team concept developed by Evernham, will start alongside Elliott in the front row.

What the Dodge taskmaster wants next is 500 miles out of his engines Sunday.

“When I came to work on the Dodge program, this engine was on a computer screen,” said the man who guided Jeff Gordon to meteoric heights a few years ago, then left to develop a car that would return Dodge to Winston Cup racing after an absence of 17 years.

“There were no hard parts for [the engine]. I told somebody that I felt like the man that jumped off the cliff and I’m building a parachute on the way down.”

Remarkably, all eight of the other Dodges entered are in position to get into Sunday’s 43-car field through today’s twin 125-mile qualifying heats.

For his own team, the anchor of the DaimlerChrysler program, Evernham chose drivers Elliott, 44, whose own team had recently been dropped by longtime sponsor McDonald’s, and Casey Atwood, a teenage rookie.

“I don’t know why people were surprised when I got Bill,” Evernham said. “He is the perfect guy to be the cornerstone of our team. First, he is a great driver. He has the experience we need, he knows how to win and he’s an excellent chassis setup guy. And as a guy who’s been around, he makes the perfect teacher for Casey.”

As work on the project progressed, other teams announced plans to join Evernham.

Richard Petty, who won two of his seven Daytona 500s in Dodges, returned Petty Enterprises to his former brand with drivers John Andretti, Buckshot Jones and Kyle Petty, Richard’s son.

Chip Ganassi, who has made a career of changing brands--and winning--in CART, decided to make his full-time NASCAR debut with Dodges for the veteran Sterling Marlin and rookie Jason Leffler, who left Joe Gibbs’ Busch team to accept Ganassi’s offer of a Winston Cup ride.

Bill Davis, who’d brought Jeff Gordon into NASCAR from the U.S. Auto Club open-wheel ranks, switched from Pontiac to Dodge and brought along veteran driver Ward Burton and sprint car champion Dave Blaney.

Melling Racing, which had been Elliott’s owner in his early days as a Ford driver, not only joined Dodge with Compton as a single-car entry, but also gave Elliott back his old number, 9, for his red Dodge. Melling took No. 92 for his red look-alike.

“What I like most about the way Ray has developed the Dodge--other than Bill being on the pole--is the way he has involved all 10 Dodges in the program,” said Lou Patane, DaimlerChrysler vice president of motor sports operations. “Two of them are sponsored by the Dodge Dealers and the UAW National Training Center, but the reality was, this is a one-team concept.”

Patane, as the senior DaimlerChrysler official involved in racing, said the recent cut of 26,000 employees from the manufacturer’s work force would have no effect on the future of Dodge’s Winston Cup program.

“From senior management’s perspective and right from [U.S. CEO] Dr. Dieter Zetsche’s perspective, this program is in place and will not change,” Patane said. “We’re still long-term committed to this strategy because we believe it will fulfill the marketing objective of Dodge, not only this year, but into the future.”

It’s a modern-day version of the old “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” motto that NASCAR promoted 50 years ago.

Winning the pole for the DaimlerChrysler brand certainly did the job, for one day at least, putting Dodge in headlines everywhere--and creating its own controversy.

Not everyone was surprised to see Elliott coming off a rather lackluster series of practice times to suddenly jump up with the fastest car at Daytona.

“We’ve said all along that if you give Ray and those types of people that long to build a car--and they weren’t hollering when they were down here running 179 miles an hour . . . “ said Dale Jarrett, last year’s Daytona 500 winner. “If they were seriously that bad off, they would have been hollering and we didn’t hear a thing out of them.

“They ought to have a good car. They used the Ford Taurus templates to build it off of and took what was wrong with the Taurus and made it better. That’s just smart business on their part. You can’t blame anybody, NASCAR or anybody, because you had no idea.”

“The thing I see that makes the difference in their cars and all the other cars that I’ve watched is, they’ve been able to really pin the nose of the car down with a lot of rebound in the front shocks. It’s a violent ride, but if you can do that, you can really pick up some speed. If you do that with the Fords, and the Chevrolets too, all it does is pick the back end of the car up in the air and create drag. So, the Dodges have worked that out and that seems to be their advantage.”

Jeff Gordon, who’d spent his NASCAR career with Evernham before his crew chief left for Dodge, was another who was not surprised.

“I knew he was sandbagging,” Gordon said jokingly. “You know, I think that shows what time and effort can do in putting the right people in place. It’s just an unbelievable effort by him to come down here and do what they did.”

Patane, asked about the perception among fans and the media that the Dodge team, Elliott in particular, had been sandbagging in testing and practice, said:

“I wish . . . we were that good, and that smart. The way I would describe it is that when you look at the 500-day quest we’ve been on here and broke it down into 45-day sections, the first 45 days we didn’t learn as much obviously as we did the last 45 days. . . . The last two 45-day segments, we learned absolutely the most we did about the race cars on the race track with the engine combinations in the frame rails than we did even 90 days before that.

“It’s not that we’re working any harder. We’re learning more at the end of the curve than we were at the beginning or the middle. It’s kind of like you’re doing the decorating more on the house rather than just digging the hole for the foundation.”

Gary Nelson, NASCAR’s vice president in charge of maintaining a balance among the manufacturers, said, “What we try to do in this sport is, with the rules and the way we try to make the competition, is to showcase the drivers’ skills. And then, when you look at it, Bill Elliott with all his poles, Ray Evernham with all his poles, they’re going to be tough anywhere they go when they hook up.”

Elliott’s pole was the 50th of his Winston Cup career and his fourth for the Daytona 500. Paired with Gordon, Evernham crewed for 30 Cup poles, including the 1999 Daytona 500.

For Elliott, the 1985 Daytona 500 winner and 1988 Winston Cup champion, it is a renaissance of sorts. Winless since the 1994 Southern 500 at Darlington, when he drove for Junior Johnson, Elliott spent six frustrating years running his own team with minimal success.

“I kept thinking there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but I finally realized it was a train coming,” Elliott said.

“I’m just thankful to be out of [the business side of racing] and being able to focus on the driver’s side. Last year, I knew what my destiny was. Once I got through and said, ‘OK, this is the end of Bill Elliott Racing, I want to go drive for Ray Evernham,’ everything was fine.”