Ron Hornaday Jr.’s loss is Kyle Busch’s gain.

Rick Ren, the crew chief who led Hornaday to two NASCAR Camping World Truck Series championships in three years, has moved over to Kyle Busch Motorsports for 2010, the team’s inaugural year in the Truck Series.

Ren will serve as the director of competition for the two-truck operation. While those outside the sport may have been shocked at Ren’s departure from powerhouse Kevin Harvick Inc., I wasn’t surprised. Busch was one of the very few people or organizations who could have lured him away from KHI.

Ren was instrumental in formulating the successful program that KHI now enjoys and his pairing with Hornaday was excellent. But the chance to be an integral member on the ground floor of building a team for a driver of Busch’s caliber certainly ranks as one of the few scenarios capable of tempting Ren to leave his comfort zone at KHI.

When the rumor of Ren’s departure first began circulating, I wrote out a list of pros and cons regarding the situation and ended up with two more pros than cons. One of the biggest selling points on my sheet, and eventually in Ren’s revelations as well, was his greatly-reduced commute to work at KBM versus KHI. Ren resides in Mooresville, N.C., where KBM will be based. Since the majority of NASCAR teams are stationed in Mooresville while KHI is located in Kernersville, the hour-plus commute to Harvick’s shop has been one of the biggest and most consistent hurdles the team faces in attracting quality employees. When you travel as much as these teams do, distance between home and the office can be a determining factor. But most important to Ren was the opportunity to work with Busch in forming an organization that potentially could be wildly successful, and I think the two together will be a powerful force.

Make no mistake – Busch will not fail in this endeavor. I expect his dedication to this sport and the kind of people who want to be associated with him to make this team a formidable one from the get-go. I anticipate Busch and Ren will put together an operation that will rival or outperform KHI, and you couldn’t ask for anything better than that for the competitive landscape in the Truck Series.

And obviously, if Busch’s group one day will contend with or beat KHI, the impact will be felt within the No. 33 KHI camp to some degree in the early days. But Hornaday is one of the best, if not the best, Truck Series drivers of all time and has succeeded with nearly everyone with whom he has been paired. The equipment at KHI is top-notch and I have no reasonto think that newly-tabbed crew chief Dave Fuge won’t mesh well with Hornaday next year.

But will Hornaday be as dominant as he was in 2009? That’s a big question mark in my book. The team is changing engine suppliers and crew chiefs and also lost their truck chief to another team, so reorganization is the name of the game at KHI during the off-season. It will take a lot of work for Hornaday and Fuge to establish solid communication right off the bat and dominate in the fashion Hornaday did in 2009.

But Hornaday’s crew isn’t the only one with a mountain to climb. Busch and his newly-established team have an incredible amount of work ahead of them in the coming months. They are in the process of building a new shop and will be working out of the old Xpress Motorsports shop until it’s complete. The 2010 Truck Series’ schedule will play into their favor, though, in the early part of the year, as we race only three times within seven weeks beginning at Daytona before getting into a more regular rhythm. This is a deviation from years past when we went from Daytona to Fontana and it will be a much-welcomed few weeks off for this fledgling team to build equipment, work out logistics and establish communication.

The biggest challenge in team management is putting the right people in place because everyone knows NASCAR is a people business as much as it is a racing business. And Kyle Busch has scored big with his first move in hiring Rick Ren.