Big changes await Elliott this season

Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2001 | 10:18 a.m.

Of the 10 NASCAR Winston Cup drivers who have made the move to Dodge this season, Bill Elliott is perhaps facing the biggest change of his 25-year career.

Elliott not only is switching from Ford to Dodge, the 45-year-old Georgia native is joining a new team, Evernham Motorsports, and giving up the role as a team owner.

By concentrating more on driving and less on running a race team, Elliott said he is hoping he can regain the form that carried him to 40 career Winston Cup victories and more than $23 million in earnings.

"There are a lot of things that I won't have to worry about that take your focus off the race car," Elliott said Monday during the final day of a two-day Dodge test at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. "Before, you had sponsor things ... a lot of different things to worry about (and) it was not as much fun.

"I still enjoyed driving but when you're not running well like I did (in 1999), it was kind of a tough way to go. This business is hard enough as it is and if you don't achieve the goals that you want to achieve, it makes it even harder."

After six winless years as a driver/car owner, and 25 years driving Fords, Elliott opted to fold his team at the end of last season and join Ray Evernham's two-car Dodge effort as a teammate to Casey Atwood.

The 15-time NASCAR Winston Cup Most Popular Driver said he has no qualms about joining a brand-new team in the highly competitive series.

"I went through a lot of changes in my lifetime so, no, there's no nervousness," Elliott said. "The biggest deal for me was when I went from driving for (Harry) Melling to driving for Junior (Johnson) in '92 -- that was a pretty dramatic change.

"And then coming back and running my own deal, you've got a lot more on the line than just showing up and driving for somebody else. At the end of the day, it's still how well everything comes together and with Ray's expertise and having Casey as a teammate and having all the people that (Evernham) can encircle you with should make everything a lot easier."

Although Monday's test session was cut short by an afternoon rainstorm, Elliott said he feels his new team is on track and ready for next month's Daytona 500.

"So far things are going real well, we haven't had any problems," he said. "I think right now we're trying to get used to working with different people -- Ray has added a lot of people to his staff and we're trying to mesh everybody together.

"This is more of a test getting people working well together and acclimated and what we need to work on for the next test. Eventually, when we start racing, hopefully we'll have all of the pieces of the puzzle put together by that time."

Although neither Evernham nor Dodge released official times from the two-day test, unofficial hand timing of several cars revealed that the Dodges were not that far off the pole speed for last year's CarsDirect.com 400 at LVMS.

Elliott said it was impossible for him to gauge how close the Dodges will be to the competition at Daytona because Goodyear has developed a new tire for the race at Las Vegas and no other manufacturers have tested with it at LVMS.

"We're trying to see how well we stack up -- which we still don't know because this is a different tire than we ran here last year," he said. "We really don't have anything to base it on from the other teams because nobody else has been here with this particular tire.

"As we gather data and once we compile all the data we can from this test and analyze it, we'll see where we're at and where we can be better and then we'll be able to judge where we stack up when people come back here to test."