Elliott Sadler ready to get back to work for Gillett Evernham
Elliott Sadler says there are no hard feelings between him and his Gillett Evernham Motorsports team and that he expects the group to be stronger than ever entering the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup season.
Sadler endured a rather unusual offseason, one in which he says he was never told that he was out of his No. 19 car for this season, but where he did file court papers announcing his intent to seek a legal injunction that would protect his job. The team, which has since announced a planned merger with Petty Holdings and Richard Petty, did make an attempt to buy out his contract, which led to the legal filing.
Now, though, safely back in the car, Sadler says that all of that is in the past. The driver, who has been with the organization since late in the 2006 season, says he has learned a lot over the course of his full-time Cup career, which began with Wood Brothers Racing in 1999. That helped him deal with his offseason situation.
"I think we've all been a part of this business long enough to know that performance is the bottom line, and when you don't perform, you sit down in meetings and try to hash through things, and some of the meetings are good, and some of them are not. But at the end of the day, everybody has to be held accountable for what you're trying to do on and off the race track," he said during a national teleconference Wednesday. "We went through some meetings this winter where the team was not happy with the No. 19 team's performance and how we'd run on the race track and, of course, I wasn't either because at the end of the day you want to be in the Chase [For The Sprint Cup] and you want to contend for wins. We had some meetings, and some of them were good, and some of them were bad.
"I don't think it's fair to sit here and say today that the team didn't want me. I think what they want is the best possible situation they feel they can succeed in … We both want whatever is best for the 19 team and our sponsors and also Elliott Sadler. We've hashed through all of that. We think we've made some headway because of that. We really feel optimistic about a lot of the changes that we've made to the 19 team going into Daytona."
Sadler says those changes include alterations to the car that the organization will run this year, as well as personnel changes, including the decision to make Kevin Buskirk his crew chief.
And Sadler doesn't expect the offseason situation to have any lingering effects.
"It shouldn't," he said. "We're professionals, and when we show up to play, we should be ready to play. And when we're on the field, we should give it 100 percent, whether it’s me in the race car or the guys doing the pit stops or the guys bolting the shocks on. As far as the team is concerned and myself is concerned, it's in the past. I've been at the shop the last two days. [There hasn't been] one conversation about what happened a week ago. All the conversations were how can we go to Daytona and be competitive, how can we go to California, the next race, and be competitive. That is the mentality that we have right now at Gillett Evernham Motorsports.”
Sadler said that it was up to him “to be a leader and a quarterback for my team, and my focus, and all my energy right now, is [on] going to Daytona and being successful."
Still, he admits that he endured a tough winter. He says that he can't remember the specifics of how the entire situation evolved, but that he took the only steps that he could to protect his Cup future. He doesn't express any regrets over that - nor does he think anyone in the organization should.
"Myself and the team were looking at a lot of different ways to be better, and sometimes the ideas were not on the same page, so there was a lot of debating and things going on," he said. "We came up with a whole list of things to change, and one of those was a driver change. … As far as the legal part of it and stuff like that, I think there comes a time in everybody’s life when you're seeking legal guidance, and I can sit here and tell you and be very honest with you, when it comes to contracts and the language and stuff that are on them, I'm not the smartest guy in the world. And when you're dealing with as many people as we're dealing with, it became bigger than Elliott Sadler. It was bigger than just Gillett Evernham Motorsports. We have a lot of contracts in place between each other, with sponsors, with personal-service contracts, with manufacturers. There's a lot of different things that come into play from the legal side of it that, honestly, I don't know a lot about.
"So they did, my legal team did what they thought they had to do to protect me, to protect some of the sponsors and stuff that we have. But between me and the team, I never wanted the legal stuff to come between me and them. When I called people on the team and talked to them about what the car is doing … I didn't want that to come in between us, so I let them handle it the best way they wanted to do, and I had to trust in my advisers and my attorney to be able to handle the stuff the way they were handling it. As far as me and the team, we had some debates and we had some disagreements, but I think at the end of the day we have figured out how to work through this. We all have the same goal. We feel like we're pulling in the same direction now. … We're putting our best foot forward and moving ahead from this."
