Lee Beard, the team manager at Don Schumacher Racing, confirmed Tuesday his job at DSR is being eliminated. Beard’s last day at DSR is Friday.

“I had a meeting with Don (Monday) and he informed me that he was making budget cuts,” Beard said. “He was eliminating three upper-level management positions and mine was one of them. He is going through his whole race organization and trying to streamline spending and budgets and stuff, and he felt there were three upper-level management positions he was going to eliminate. Mine as team manager was one of them.”

Beard has a three-year contract with Don Schumacher, which is expires on Dec. 31 of this year.

“He (Don) had talked about it before (making cuts),” Beard said. “Sponorship money is hard to come by, keeping his business profitable is important to him. He just looked at everything, and that’s the direction he wanted to go. He will still honor the contract, but I’m free to find work elsewhere. Don and I are not leaving on bad terms at all. We are still very close friends. It was a hard decision for him to make. He is friends with myself and my family and it is just business.”

Lee Beard, the team manager at Don Schumacher Racing, confirmed Tuesday his job at DSR is being eliminated. Beard’s last day at DSR is Friday.

“I had a meeting with Don (Monday) and he informed me that he was making budget cuts,” Beard said. “He was eliminating three upper-level management positions and mine was one of them. He is going through his whole race organization and trying to streamline spending and budgets and stuff, and he felt there were three upper-level management positions he was going to eliminate. Mine as team manager was one of them.”

Beard has a three-year contract with Don Schumacher, which is expires on Dec. 31 of this year.

“He (Don) had talked about it before (making cuts),” Beard said. “Sponorship money is hard to come by, keeping his business profitable is important to him. He just looked at everything, and that’s the direction he wanted to go. He will still honor the contract, but I’m free to find work elsewhere. Don and I are not leaving on bad terms at all. We are still very close friends. It was a hard decision for him to make. He is friends with myself and my family and it is just business.”

Beard began the 2011 season as the crew chief on Johnny Gray’s Funny Car. Beard, however, was reassigned at DSR in the first of July and Rob Wendland, Gray’s assistant crew chief, was promoted to crew chief.

“He (Don Schumacher) didn’t hire me in there to be a crew chief, he hired me in there to be the team manager,” Beard said. “We just did what we had to do to get (Johnny) Gray’s program up and running until we got the right people in place to run their program. That really didn’t come into to play (in terms of eliminating his team manager job).”

This was Beard’s second stint at DSR, he tuned Whit Bazemore to 12 national event Funny Car wins while serving as a crew chief from 2001-2005.

Beard has been involved with drag racing for over 40 years. He started as a crew chief in 1976 and has guided Top Fuel and Funny Cars to 53 NHRA national event wins and 60 No. 1 qualifying positions.

Beard served as the late Gary Ormsby’s crew chief, leading him to the 1989 NHRA Top Fuel world championship. Beard also served as a team manager when Cruz Pedregon captured the 1992 Funny Car world title. Most recently, Beard was part of Tony Schumacher’s Top Fuel crown in 2009.

Prior to rejoining DSR in January of 2009, Beard served as the Top Fuel crew chief for David Powers Motorsports for three seasons.

“I got a tremendous amount of enjoyment out of going to an unknown or small team when I went to David Powers,” Beard said. “David gave me the ability to put together a championship-caliber team, and we had a pretty good run there with Hot Rod finishing second in the points. Then, we brought on the Matco program and took a rookie (Top Fuel) driver in Antron Brown and he won two races his first season and finished in the top five. I look back at all that kind of stuff and it is very rewarding. What I would really like to do is get back to what really kind of made me and that was going with unknown teams and turning them into championship contender. I would like to find somebody who is ready to move from alcohol up to Top Fuel or somebody who is already in Top Fuel who has the money and the drive to be a championship contender.”

Beard doesn’t have any immediate plans brewing right now.

“I really have not talked to anybody at all,” Beard said. “I wasn’t sure until Don (Schumacher) made his final decision what he was going to do. There was a point around the U.S. Nationals where he thought he was going to add another Top Fuel car. Any time that you have to build a complete a race operation, all the equipment, hire the personnel, and build a car from that, I felt if that program would have come together, I could have really been instrumental in helping them get that done. But, evidently that is not going to transpire.”

Beard has had numerous accomplishments in his past tenure at DSR.

Beard established a relationship between DSR and the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis motorsports engineering program.

“That was 100 percent my idea to establish a relationship with the university (IUPUI),” Beard said. “We used their professors and engineering students to go in and scientifically prove the chassis with all the tools that the university had, then we made the decision to go ahead and build our own cars.”

Back in late 2009 and into January of 2010, Beard also was in charge of putting together two complete Top Fuel dragster teams for the Yas Marina Curcuit, after it partnered with DSR. Yas Marina is a motor racing circuit in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

“The reality is in the last two years, I was the project manager that oversaw four 18-wheel rigs put together, two for Abu Dhabi, and the two for Johnny Gray’s operation, seven complete race cars, four for Abu Dhabi, and two for Johnny Gray’s team and the car (dragster) we recently put together for Cory Mac and Santo Rapisarda,” Beard said. “I had a fantastic three years at Don Schumacher Racing and transformed it from a race car team into a race car factory. Looking forward, my real desire is to take some up-and-coming talent and team and turn them into championship contenders on the NHRA circuit.”