Saturday

Petty Enterprises Hits Another Rough Stretch

The Texas 500 weekend was not good for a number of teams, but for a few it was downright horrid. For one in particular it was yet another rough stretch on a road it has traveled all decade and with seemingly no positive ending in sight. This recent contact with a career pothole began entering the weekend at Texas, but the journey to that moment long predated the weekend.

By no stretch can Petty Enterprises, the sport’s ultimate bastion of history, consider this decade to have been anything but one of misery. A decade that began with the future seemingly coming back from the past reached a scene in 2008 where the team’s namesake driver was benched in favor of an up-and-comer who’d driven a Petty car twice before. In between lay a trail of failures, false starts, and the dissipation of great promise.

It had not appeared destined for that, for in 1999 Petty Enterprises celebrated its 50th anniversary with a competitive season, winning at Martinsville in both Craftsman Trucks and Winston Cup, and contending at most other speedways. In November day-to-day control of the organization was assumed by Kyle Petty, who’d returned to the team first with a quasi-satellite car, the #44, in 1997; the #44 was based at the former Rahmoc Racing shop in Mooresville, NC; it had run strongly in 1997, but after faltering in 1998 it was switched into the man Petty shops in Randleman, NC.

Petty Enterprises’ trail of failures and false starts wound up beginning in the decision to switch to Daimler Chrysler’s new Winston Cup program. 2000 was a year where the team would race Pontiacs while working with fellow Pontiac-ian Bill Davis Racing and ex-Hendrick head wrench Ray Evernham to develop the Dodge Intrepid. The team’s long-time crew chief Robbie Loomis had taken a lucrative deal at Hendrick Motorsports, and his absence would up making more of a difference than anyone could realize – working with Richard Petty, Robbie had been instrumental in directing the team as it dug itself out from a disasterous 1989 toward competitive respectability.

The season was thrown into chaos for Petty Enterpises with he death of Adam Petty, who had driven ASA cars in 1998 and Petty BGN cars in 1999 in preparation for a Winston Cup effort in a third Petty Dodge in 2001. Suddenly the organization was thrown off course emotionally, and it extended well beyond Adam Petty’ death – Kyle Petty took a sabbatical from driving the #44 Pontiac, then returned to the car by June, then in August Kyle left the #44 Winston Cup car to drive the #45 BGN car Adam Petty had raced. The #44 team lost a level of stability it had had with Kyle and the remaining ten weeks of 2000 reflected this, as driver Steve Grissom – whose driving style fit better with the Busch team than Kyle’s -made only four races of the season’s final ten, highlighted only by a sparkling battle for a top spot at Talladega in October.

But the chaos was just beginning. Kyle now drove the #45, John Andretti had the #43, and Buckshot Jones had the #44. Petty Enterprises stumbled at the 2001 Daytona 500 and nothing ever got better, despite a pair of top-six finishes for Andretti early in the year. Kyle failed to qualify twelve times and Jones missed six races; thy combined to leadjust three laps all season. The efforts of all three cas were so bad that former Penske crew chief Robin Pemberton was hired as a general maager for 2002.

Immediately the team improved, especially the Jones #44 as it ran to the front several times and made up lost laps in four races. But Jones was inexplicably fired in April, and the team began shuffling crew chiefs around while the #44 ran throuh several drivers. A fateful mistake was then made; Pemberton had begun laying the groundwork for a modern enginering effort, along the lines of what Penske Racing had done, but after the season Kyle Petty summoned Pemberton to his office and officially vetoed Pemberton’s engineering effort. “Kyle and whoever his confidantes were at the time didn’t think this was the road to take,” Pemberton said. Pemberton argued with Kyle, who stuck to his guns. Incensed at apparantly being undercut by Kyle, Pemberton quit.

The Petty team paid dearly for this. It was bad enough that the sports’ technology arms race and burgeoning have-have nots resource gap was becoming a sharper issue hurting the sport’s competitive depth, but they had been issues – albiet not as sharp – whe Richard Petty and Robbie Loomis ran the team and overcame such issues to win races in the late 1990s. It helped then that they ran Pontiacs and had forged a strong inter-team cooperation with other Pontiacs to spped up developmentof the cars; this approach was supposedly put into an official slogan with Dodge – One Team – but as soon as 2001 started it was undecut by the factory brass in Stuttgart who let their teams devolve into seperate fiefdoms.

Thus were outside issues further stressing the Petty team and making mistaken personnel moves and inferior organization hurt all the more. The team did not lack talented drivers, but their talent was never able to break through due to all the issues hurting the team. As a result, Petty Enterprises limped along, amassing only four top ten finishes in the 2003-5 period.

Help finally arrived when Robbie Loomis returned to become GM. With new driver Bobby Labonte, Loomis began whipping the Petty team back toward some kind of shape, and 2006 was a season of production. However, production was made almost entirely by Labonte and the #43; Kyle’s #45 was instead getting worse, despite top ten finishes at Atlanta and Martinsville and an 11th at Texas for good measure. It continued in 2007, and a somewhat graphic difference in the #45 became noticed when Kyle took a sabbatical in June and July to do TV work. Chad McCumbee drove the #45 at Pocono and raced quite well; John Andretti ran the car in several other races and perfomed commendably at Michigan and Chicago and showed promise at Daytona; and in all of these races the #45 was driven with greater hustle, greater desire. Everywhere else the #45 ran, other than a shocking fuel-mileage third at the World 600, Kyle was not just off the pace, he was embarassingly so; a long-time criticism of his driving – that he refused to charge the corners hard enough to go faster, and that he backed off from fights for position too often – was proving more and more valid.

When Kyle failed to make the field at Martinsville – a track where he’d posted two of his better finishes of 2007 – that apparantly was the final straw in the decision to put McCumbee in the #45 for the Texas 500. And this was followed by another crew chief change, with youngster Stewart Cooper taking charge. Possessing a degree in engineering should help Cooper. It is also enouraging that Petty Enterprises is building a test team to be headed by Billy Wilburn – the irony of such a move coming years after the fateful argument with Robin Pemberton is not to be lost.

The #43’s search for new sonsorship will no doubt be a serious one and one can feel optimistic of success there. Certainly reason exists for optimism for the Petty team and one hopes Bobby Labonte and young Chad McCumbee remain integral parts of that success.