Dave Rogers will begin his new career as Kyle Busch's Sprint Cup Series crew chief in Sunday's Dickies 500 at Texas Motor Speedway.
And although Rogers is no stranger to calling the shots in the world of NASCAR, he knows his assignment with Busch and the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 18 team will be the biggest challenge of his career.
"I don't have any expectations," Rogers said. "I'm just satisfied to be here. The key for this weekend is to start to learn Kyle, start to learn the COT, gel with the crew here, work on our communications -- we're just building connection here. If we could run top-five that would be fantastic but we're not going to be disappointed if we can't do that."
While Rogers and Busch are familiar with each other working together in the Sprint Cup Series will be a whole different experience for the duo.
"We spent a little bit of time together but not much," Rogers said. "I've been taking a crash course in COT racing. I spent a lot of time with my setup guys and my car chief just trying to figure out about these cars, what the rules are, how we set them up. Just trying to learn the race car itself so Kyle and I haven't spent a lot of time together."
Rogers experienced great success in the Nationwide Series with the Gibbs program but felt the offer to replace Steve Addington and work with Busch in the Cup Series was something he couldn't pass on.
"Certainly, one of the toughest decisions I've ever made in my life," he said. "Life was very good when they were running well, I had Sunday's at home with my wife and kids -- life was great. I couldn't have asked for anything better. I didn't have to come over here and do this.
"I just didn't need to do it, but when the opportunity came up and you realize that Kyle is a driver and you look at the engineering staff that Joe Gibbs Racing has, you just couldn't pass the opportunity up. Hopefully we'll have the same thing over here that we had on the Nationwide side."
As the season winds down, Rogers is looking forward to the last three races of the season as an education process and an opportunity to prepare for the 2010 campaign.
"It's very important to find direction," Rogers said. "When I go back, we have the best engineering staff in the business. There's some brilliant people that work for Joe Gibbs Racing and what they want from me is they want me to give them direction of what projects do I need to work on throughout the winter.
"That's the question I need to answer, that Mike Ford (11 crew chief) has got to answer, Zippy (Greg Zipadelli, 20 crew chief) has got to answer. We've got to sit down after Homestead and say, 'Hey, what direction do we want to take this race team and how do we use the engineering department to work in that direction.' That's what these next three races are about."
