Sharpie 500 - Kyle Petty Notes

Kyle Petty Notes, Quotes: Sharpie 500
‘Toughness’ of Bristol boils down to circumstances

Kyle Petty and the #45 Georgia-Pacific/Brawny Dodge team head to the high-banked, .533-mile Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway this week for Saturday night’s Sharpie 500 NASCAR Nextel Cup Series race.

Petty, 44, will be making his 702nd career start this weekend. He is 10th on the all-time list in NASCAR Cup career starts, and fourth among active drivers. His eight career victories place him 45th on NASCAR’s all-time list in Cup wins. One of the most recognizable names in international motorsports, as is his sponsor, Georgia-Pacific, Petty’s driving career began with a five-race season in 1979. The native of Level Cross, N.C., has won over $19 million.

The thoughts of Georgia-Pacific/Brawny Dodge driver Kyle Petty heading into Bristol:

“How tough Bristol is on a driver depends a lot of where you are running at the time. If you are running up front, you generally have an easier time of things than if you are running in the middle of the pack. The guy up front doesn’t usually have to beat and bang his way around the race track, he can just nudge and push. Lead the race and the lapped cars won’t always work with you, but there tends to be a little more leniency from the (race control) tower if you ‘ease’ your way past them with a couple of bumps. And if you make the guy mad, well, he won’t be able to keep up with you to retaliate anyway.

“It’s a tough race on sheet metal, and can really take a toll on your race car. This is the time of year when your fabricator quits talking to you – he just gives you knowing looks in the shop every day. By the end of the race Saturday night, you have a pretty good idea of whether he will be talking to you again next week or not.

“A lot of charities have started auctioning off torn sheet metal. If they all got together and picked up the stuff just from Bristol and Martinsville, we might be able to handle the bulk of those auctions just at those two places. Obviously, your goal is to keep as much of the car on your car as you possibly can.

“Bristol is a matter of survival more than anything else, but it’s not your ordinary, ‘to finish first, first you have to finish’ type deal. You have to be running at the end, but you have to be running on the lead lap – or the way the Lucky Dog thing works, the first car a lap down. You spend 450 laps trying your best to not just stay out of trouble but to keep the leaders in sight. Then you use those last 50 laps to close the deal.

“The thing is, those last 50 laps don’t guarantee you anything. Most of the torn-up race cars seem to come in the first 100 laps – when everybody is dicing it up and the guys in the back are doing everything they can do to stay on the lead lap - and the last 100, when everybody is trying to get everything they can get before the race ends. So you are still trying your best to survive the last 50 laps, but you have to do it by being aggressive too.

“Early cautions can be pretty tough for everybody, but especially the guys towards the end. A single-file restart at Bristol early in the race puts the last car in line awfully close to the leader of the race. So that last guy is beating and banging his way out of that position – half the time it looks like Fred Flintstone trying to get in the house after Dino locks him out – and the leader is coming up on him pretty fast. That last car has a ton of cars in front of him; the leader has nothing but clean air.

“You hear that cautions breed cautions, and it’s true. But at Bristol they tend to breed because of desperation at the end of the field, trying to keep from being lapped. The thing is, the leader comes up on those cars so fast, he gets hemmed in sometimes and runs into trouble, or there is trouble right in front of him and he runs in that.

“Survival is the name of the game, plain and simple, and that’s the way this Georgia-Pacific/Brawny Dodge team is approaching Bristol. Stay away from the end of the field but stay within shouting distance of the front, and then go as hard as we can those last 50 or so laps. Do that, stay out of trouble – and hope for some luck – and it could be a good night for us.”