Kyle Petty

KYLE PETTY (No. 45 Wells Fargo Financial Dodge Charger)

HOW GOOD CAN YOU BE IN THE DAYTONA 500? “I don’t know. Both cars are really good. I thought Bobby had a shot at winning the 150 we were in. I hate it when we caught the last caution. I looked at Bobby and thought it might not be good for him. Obviously it was good for us with seven-10 laps to go. Paul (crew chief Andrews) made a great call and we got back out there. Then with the green-white-checkered (G-W-C) that put Bobby in a bad position because he was coming up until that point.”

THE SHOOTOUT AND BOTH DUELS FINISHED G-W-C “It’ll go caution free Sunday. No, but Bobby had a shot at winning the 150 By putting two cars in the top six and then we’ve been at the top of the board all week. If you look at the top of the board for qualifying our speeds were in the top 10 pre-qualifying and then we had gear trouble just like the 10 car did, and that didn’t help us. Then in the races we were good, the top five or 10. We’ve got two good cars and we’re starting the season on a good solid note. Even being down here this week, we’ve come down here before and Tony has dominated every event or Gordon has dominated or somebody or Hendrick or Roush or Yates. Nobody is dominating right now, and I don’t think there’s a clear favorite for the 500. If there’s not a clear favorite then that plays back to a team like Petty Enterprises, a team that’s building. We’ve got just as good a chance as the other guys.”

WHEN YOU COME TO DAYTONA DOES THAT PETTY BLUE BLOOD AUTOMATICALLY START PUMPING FASTER? “Daytona has always been special for us. My grandfather won races down here. My grandfather’s career for all intents and purposes ended down here. My father won a ton of races here. It’s fun, my father won all of those Daytona 500s (seven), but he only won one 125-mile race. He just never put a lot of emphasis on the 125. It’s always been a place where Petty Enterprises tried to prepare all winter for. Even if you go back the last three or four years when we’ve been bad, this has been one of the bright spots for us. Even if we qualified 20th that was a bright spot for us during the course of the year. You put a lot of emphasis on coming here. We were really good here last year. We got in a bad place a couple of times during the race, but we qualified good. I think we were the fastest Dodge last year. We qualified 11th or 12th. That shows we’ve made some progress because we came back this year and Bobby was sixth. You’re not all the way there, but you’re a lot closer to the pole. We were five 10ths off last year. We’re only two or three 10ths off this time. When you look at it like that we’ve made some big gains. I think Robbie (Loomis) brought a lot of that and Paul being there for a year to get Robbie and Todd and those guys up to speed helped. I think Paul is the one in this whole group that has been underrated or left out because he’s got the other guys up to speed pretty good.”

YOU SAID THURSDAY THAT BOBBY FEELS LIKE HE’S GOT SOMETHING TO PROVE “I think he wants to prove to himself and everybody else out there… When you stay at one place for a long time, and Bobby and I have talked about this before because I stayed at Felix’s for eight or nine years, and during that time you think you’re making huge progress but at the end of that time you look back on it sometimes and think maybe you should have left a little earlier. I think in some ways Bobby personally feels that maybe he was too personally tied to the team and too personally involved and maybe he should have left a little sooner. There was a question last night on Eli’s show. Somebody asked him if he ever doubted himself and he said yes. He did doubt himself, and I think that’s what happens if you stay at one place too long. When I say Bobby has something to prove I think as much as anything he has something to prove to himself, that he can go somewhere else and be the driver that Bobby Labonte can be, not necessarily that he has anything to prove to the Gibbs organization or anybody out there or the fans, I think he has something to prove to himself, which is a harder thing to do than sticking it in somebody’s face. When you’ve got to stick it in your own face, like that commercial where you’re sticking it to the man and you are the man. It’s the same thing, and I think that’s what he’s trying to do, prove to himself that he can be a driver and he can win races again and will win races again. I think he’s gone a long way in the first few days down here in doing that.”

DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO PROVE? “No, no. I’m past the point where I try to prove stuff. You know what I mean? If I did I’d be a better fisherman. I just don’t. You don’t what I mean? I think Bobby and Robbie and Todd and that whole group will make Petty Enterprises better. When the water rises, then it’ll bring the 45 up too, and I think that’s what we saw yesterday and what we’ve seen all along. As the fortunes come up at Petty Enterprises both teams get better. I still think I can win races. I’m not the driver I once was, and that’s just the way it is, but you can still win races. Are you going to win tons of races and all that stuff? No, but you can slide in there and get a race now and then and if you go through the garage area there’s a lot of guys like that can. We’ve just got to put ourselves in position at Petty Enterprises where we can do it a lot more consistently.”

EVEN LAST YEAR, GOOD OR BAD, BOTH CARS WERE CLOSE TOGETHER “Yeah, and that’s the way it’s always been. I’ve said it all along. Even when we started five years ago with Dodge and we went through the Intrepid and now the Charger, the point for us in a lot of ways was consistency. If you could build two cars coming out of the same shop and make them consistent that was OK. We just need to raise that level of consistency. That’s what we said, and we feel like Robbie and Paul and Bobby and Todd and that group and I give those guys a lot of credit. At the same time, you walk in our trailer and we’ve got two new shock guys. There’s a new shock guy on the 45 and the 43. We’ve got guys at the shop that are brand new, that came because of that group. We’ve got guys on the pit crew that came to Petty Enterprises because of those guys. It’s a lot deeper with the change of personnel at Petty Enterprises. The morale and motivation runs a lot deeper this year.”

IF THE KING TOLD THE TRUTH, WOULD HE RATHER SEE THE 43 OR 45 WIN? “I’d rather win. I’ll be honest. From a personal standpoint, I’d rather be the guy. From a company standpoint the 43 is important. It has to win. That’s who we are. That’s our brand. That’s like GM selling cars. They’ve got to sell Chevys. They can sell all the GMs and Cadillacs they want to, but Chevy’s their brand. That’s what makes or breaks the back of General Motors. For us, the 43 is our car. That’s who we are. That’s who we’ll always be. That’s who Petty Enterprises will always be. The 43 has to win races. For longevity and for what we need, we need the 43 to win.”

IS THE KING SMILING MORE THESE DAYS? “He’s not calling us into the back office as much, let’s just say that. I won’t say he’s smiling more, but he’s not getting on to us as much.”

COMMENT ON LEVEL OF COMPETITION “There’s always only five of six guys, seven or eight guys that can win. There’s another 15 or 20 that can slide in and win. When you look at the consistent guys, I’m only going to pick the standard seven or eight. I will say this, I think if you go 20 years back and then come forward 10 years the competition doubled in those 10 years and it’s doubled again in the last 10 years. The caliber of cars, drivers, crews, it’s all gone up. That water level has raised tremendously. When you look at it, there are a ton of cars and a ton of good teams and a ton of good people who can come out and run competitively. That’s why the field is so tight when we go to open places like California and Vegas. There may be seven cars within a tenth of a second and there used to be two cars. Then you’d move to the next tenth and there would be three cars. I think that’s what makes it so competitive, and that’s why you have to be spot on when it comes to running a race or winning a race. You’ve got to make everything happen for you. You can’t overcome mistakes. If you go back a year and look at the 24 and 8, two cars that everybody made such a big deal about, in years past they’re strong enough teams that they could overcome mistakes. Last year the competition level has risen so high, a mistake really knocks you back and you can’t overcome that mistake.”

WHAT KIND OF VOID HAVE YOU SEEN THE LAST FIVE YEARS SINCE DALE EARNHARDT’S ACCIDENT? “No void. No void. You guys make a lot more out of that than anybody else does, and I’m not being, and please, I want to temper that comment by saying I don’t mean that in any way derogatory toward Dale Sr. at all. Dale Sr. was a force in this sport. Was Dale Sr. this sport? Not in any way, shape or form. If he was this sport would have shut down five years ago. What I mean is, he was at the end of his dynasty. No matter what, he would have still continued to win races. Maybe he would have won another championship. Who knows? But he was at the end of his turn at the top of the hill. It was Gordon’s turn. Gordon is the guy at the top of the hill right now, and he’s made the transition. The guy who is coming along might not even be out here right now, but the guy who will be the next Jeff Gordon or Richard Petty or Dale Earnhardt Sr. might not even be out here right now. I don’t think there has been the void everybody wants to talk about. Obviously there’s still a huge amount of Dale Earnhardt Sr. fans, just like there were if you go back 20 years when The King retired. For five or six years he still sold more souvenirs than anybody else. You look at his Q scores (advertising) and his Q scores are still higher than about 90 percent of us out here. When you look at it in those terms he’s still extremely popular, but it’s only five years removed from his death. Come back in 10 years, come back in 15 years, come back in 20 years and if there’s still a lot of No. 3 flags out here and still a lot of Dale Earnhardt stuff, then you have to say yeah, it was huge. At this time, I think it’s still too early, and I don’t mean that bad.”

DOES THERE NEED TO BE A DRIVER’S VOICE IN THE GARAGE? “There doesn’t need to be a voice in the garage. It’s just different. The sport has changed. The sport has moved past that. You go back to when my father and those guys started the professional drivers association and boycotted Talladega in the late 60s. That was a group that spoke through one person, Richard Petty, one voice that spoke to NASCAR because they thought that’s what they needed to do. That model was created during that period of time and from that time forward Richard Petty became the voice of NASCAR to NASCAR. Then Darrell Waltrip stepped into that role. Then along came Dale. That was good for the old model of NASCAR. Now NASCAR has a totally different model. That was when there was one guy sitting in that truck and one guy sitting across the street, Bill France Jr., and those were the people you had to talk to, just those two people. Now you’ve got Robin Pemberton, John Darby, Mike Helton, the marketing side, the PR side, the licensing side. It’s such an open book now if I’ve got an issue with NASCAR I just go talk to Helton or go across the street and talk to Darby or I can call Bill France or Brian France or Lesa France Kennedy. You can just call ‘em up and talk to ‘em. It’s a lot more open than it used to be. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a voice. I think Tony Stewart said it best yesterday. I was watching the first of the race and they were interviewing Tony. They said something to Tony about speaking out about bump drafting and was he the voice of the drivers? He said ‘no, anytime any of us want to, we can go up and talk to ‘em.’ That’s the way they’ve become. That’s the way NASCAR is. That’s what makes this a great sport. Any driver can go in there and say ‘I don’t like bump drafting. We need to make a rule.’ In the past it hasn’t always been that way. It’s that way now so you don’t necessarily need a representative to go in there. I don’t think Tony Stewart or Jeff Gordon or Jimmie Johnson or anybody has to fill that void because that position was beginning to be phased out no matter what.”

WILL NASCAR LISTEN TO SOME DRIVERS MORE THAN OTHERS? “Not really, I don’t think they do. You are (a troublemaker) if you go in there with just nitpicking stuff. If I’m on my roof on the backstretch because somebody put me there and I go in there, call me a troublemaker if you want to. That’s my point. There’s a lot of ways to get your point across. It goes on in Washington, D.C. everyday. It’s just lobbying. All of us can be lobbyists if you want to look at it that way. In the past we couldn’t. Now all of us can.”

HAS TONY STEWART BECOME MORE VOCAL? “If you’re not a group, why do you need a leader. If we’re not all on the same page… If anybody goes in there on some things they probably speak for me. If they go in there on other things, they’re not speaking for me. That’s not the way I feel. They can go in there and complain about X, Y and Z and that’s not the way I feel. I’m 45. I’m at this point in my career. Kyle Busch is at this point in his career. You think we have the same issues? No, we’re on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to racing. I shouldn’t be able to be his representative unless he says ‘Kyle, I really want you to go in there and talk about this.’ Nobody I know ever went to Dale Sr. or Richard Petty or anybody else and said, ‘go in the NASCAR truck and tell ‘em this.’ It wasn’t that type of representation. I think we all on this side has a little bit of misconception of what representing the drivers means. I think the sport has grown to a point where the driver is a representative of each team in a way, but the driver can into the NASCAR trailer, the owner can go into the NASCAR trailer, the crew chiefs go into the NASCAR trailer. It’s more of an open society than it used to be. Whether they listen or not that’s a totally different issue. That’s not what I’m saying, but it is more of an open forum than it used to be. That’s why I think the day of this guy is the leader of the drivers, this guy speaks for the drivers, this guy speaks for the crew chief, this guy speaks for the owners, that doesn’t happen.”

IS THERE SATISFACTION KNOWING YOU’RE BEING ASKED MORE ABOUT RACING NOW? “Obviously there is because that’s why we’re here. Obviously racing is our core business. It’s the nucleus of what we do. It’s what we have to do. Every time we do something good on the racetrack it benefits the camp. In the past you talk about the camp and try to get things generated about the camp and you’re out there struggling sometimes to make things happen at the camp. If you can run good on the racetrack that takes care of it. You get a lot of good publicity because of that. You get a lot of good publicity for the camp. I think it compliments it a lot better.”

DO YOU THINK RUNNING BETTER WILL ADD TO ADAM PETTY’S LEGACY? “Like I told Bobby when he came over, my whole goal for Bobby is to make Petty Enterprises competitive. So when I look and say if Bobby Labonte can win races here, then I know that this is a good enough team that Adam would have had a shot at winning races. Up to this point, I would say even if Adam were Jeff Gordon or Tony Stewart or Bobby Labonte, he wouldn’t have won any races, either. That makes me sad. That’s a sad thing for me to admit and a hurtful thing for me to admit because in a lot of ways I feel like I wouldn’t have given him everything he needed to run up front and be a racecar driver. On the back side of that, when this turns around and it will turn around and we start to move forward and when I see the 43 or 45 in victory lane, then I can look back and say, ‘yeah, he would have been competitive. He would have won races. That was the best shot. That would have been good for him.’ That’s the way I look at it.”

Richard Petty

RICHARD PETTY (Owner Petty Enterprises, a.k.a. The King)

COMMENT ON THE SEASON SO FAR “We changed a bunch of people, a bunch of people in the pit, a bunch of people on Kyle’s team. Really, you’re basically looking at two new teams, two different teams anyway. Qualified pretty good, Kyle had a little trouble, but he was running pretty good. Then they ran pretty decent in the race yesterday. I think everybody feels really enthusiastic about it, especially here. We tested in Vegas and stuff and it was terrible. I don’t know how that’s going to work out, but here they’ve been running decent. This is the best we’ve run down here, probably since they went to the restrictor plates. We’re pretty happy with the way things are going right now.”

COMMENT ON 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF 1976 DAYTONA 500 “I’ve been fortunate to win seven (Daytona) 500s down here. More people remember the ’76 race that I lost than any of the ones we won I think. It was a typical Richard Petty-David Pearson deal at that time. We were probably two of the most dominant cars through those years right in there. It came down to the last lap. Pearson passed me down the backstretch, which I knew he was going to do. I was able to get under him going into three. I guess he ran a little faster down the backstretch than he’d been doing and drifted a little high and I got under him. I pretty much thought I’d cleared him coming off the corner because I thought if I pulled out in front of him he couldn’t have a chance to draft back by me, but I lacked about six inches. He hit the wall and hit me and all heck broke loose then. It was one of the deals. I made a mistake or he made a mistake. It was one of those racing deals. I wound up second sitting in the infield. I told Donnie and Cale when they wrecked in ’79 and we got lucky and won that race. I told them ‘ya’ll ain’t got no class. Ya’ll wrecked on the backstretch. Me and Pearson wrecked where everybody could see what was going on.’ ”

COMMENT ON CHEATING “The way NASCAR’s got the rules and stuff now it’s getting tougher and tougher to get by with it. They’ve got something to check just about everything. It’s a little tougher for us to bend the rules. In fact, way back they had a few rules and you got between the rules and sometimes you’d get by with stuff. I always told my guys, ‘cheat neat and you’ll get by with a bunch of stuff.’ Those days are pretty much over. It’s so technical. I don’t think some of the guys working on the car even understand what’s going on because that’s how technical it got. As time progresses all of us are going to go as close to pushing the rules as we can. I don’t particular tell my guys to cheat. I just tell them not to get caught.”

COMMENT ON SUNDAY’S 48th ANNUAL DAYTONA 500 “I’ve been here since they started this stuff, and this is probably one of the few times I’ve been here that there wasn’t one or two teams I thought was dominant or a little bit better than everybody else. I think this is probably as even a field as I can remember. There’s usually somebody that’s got one that’s a little bit better than everybody. Sometimes they come down here and they’re a whole lot better than other people. I see two or three cars that are really good, but they’re not really dominating a whole lot. When they do that, that just leaves a wide open race I think. Just like the race yesterday. Bobby started up front and was able to stay there. Kyle had trouble qualifying and he started in the back and stayed back there. He got lucky at the last and got to the front. That’s the race is going to go. If you watch the race, they run five laps and everybody is in line. They run five or six more laps and they start jockeying around and after about 20 laps everybody is just running. The cars go away and all that. It’s just according to how you settle down in the race. If it’s hot it’s one thing. If it’s a cool day it’s another. Both of those races yesterday to my knowledge was screwed up because they had to run a green-white-checkered. That just takes racing away from everything. Hopefully we don’t run into that and they’re able to go ahead and run the whole race.”

HAS IT BEEN DIFFICULT DEALING WITH PETTY ENTERPRISES LACK OF SUCCESS? “If you get in a habit of doing something, it’s like everything else. Our team was pretty much in the habit of being competitive everywhere we went. I lost the edge basically for Petty Enterprises along in the mid 80s and we just never got it back, no matter who was driving or whatever. We lost a lot of deals when the big corporations came in with the Penskes, Hendrick, Roush. They came in and not that they beat you with the car deals, they’ve got a background behind them. We’re in the racing business and we don’t have anything past the racing business. These other people came in and they’ve got things beyond racing. Racing is sort of a sideline to them even though it’s a big business. It’s not that they draw monies out of their other businesses, but they know so many people in so many different walks of life that they can tap in to. When they tap into that, that makes them a stronger team even though we’ve got the same amount of money. They can tap into the different layers of things in their business. They know somebody that knows somebody and we lost out on that in the mid 80s. A lot of them also looked a little further down the line in the future than we did. We always did everything out of Level Cross, N.C., in the backyard and we were fairly successful with the thing. Then it started being a bigger and bigger business. It started going and brining more people in, more money, more technology, that kind of stuff. We still sat there in the backyard. By the time we got ready to do something about it, we were so far behind on our money and our engineering and all that stuff it’s just taken us a little time to get going. I compare it a whole lot to the New York Yankees or Green Bay. They had their ups and downs. Not that they didn’t spend money to do the deal, that was just a trend of the times. Hopefully our wheel will turn back around and we’ll be back on top again.”

HOW DO YOU LOOK AT PEOPLE THAT TURN IN CHEATERS? “The FBI and all that, half the people they catch are informants and I think NASCAR is in the same situation. I think they get informed on this stuff almost as much as they catch. I don’t know if they catch 50 percent. I would think it’d be like anything else. You get a crew and they get to working on one little thing and they keep massaging it and then they go into cheating deal. You’ve got these inspectors that have to inspect 50 cars. It’s kind of hard to inspect every little thing on every one of them. When NASCAR inspects, I don’t know how they do it, but the way it looks they say ‘OK, we’re going to check this, this and this really close this week.’ Next week they might not even check that. They might check that, that and that because they can’t check 1000 things precisely every game. I think they get told on about as much as anything else.”

WHY IS CHEATING TOLERATED IN NASCAR? “It’s been tolerated because there’s not a one of us in the garage area that hasn’t pushed the limit whether they got caught or not. Everybody tries to get the advantage, and I think that’s just the competitiveness in our sport. On the racetrack they try to get the best driver and the crew tries to give themselves the very best over everybody else. I think it’s just tolerated through the deal. Every once in awhile we’ll get excited when we get too far out of line with the cheating deal, but everything they catch people with now is strictly technical. It’s not an all-out deal like dumping lead or running big gas tanks or that kind of stuff, big motors, that stuff has passed us. A sixteenth of an inch here or a 32nd there, that’s how close they’re checking these cars.”

COMMENT ON SWITCHING TO CAR OF THE FUTURE “For us to go to the new car in my figuring is going to cost us no more than what we’re doing right now because everybody gets new cars every year even though it’s the same model they’ve been running the last eight or nine years. We didn’t change in ’81. We’d been running 115, 116-inch wheelbase. All of a sudden they come out and say ‘OK, we’re going to run 110 inch wheelbase, it’s going to be 60 inches wide and it’s going to weigh 3,400 pounds’ without a whole lot of warning – about six months. They said this is what you’re going to run. We went flogging and flogging and came down here and there was very little testing. We just came and did it. We turned ‘em loose down here and the cars were really loose. They needed more spoiler and the cars were still loose. They put some more spoiler on it and finally got the cars settled down and ran a decent race. That part of thing can still be done and still needs to be done. When they first started with the car of the future, from what little I know they said ‘let’s build the safety into it and then we’ll build the car around it.’ Now I think they’ve got into the deal where they think they’ve got some of the stuff save. As far as I’m concerned they’re working on the bodies and stuff, doing things they shouldn’t even mess with. They should make the thing look like a box, make it safe and then just turn it loose. Where I was coming back to expense, and this is my opinion on expense, if I’m going to build five new cars for this coming year, I just as well build those five cars. It’s not going to cost me any more. It’s going to cost the same amount. If they do this thing and do it like it should be done and make the car straight up where they don’t cheat the body, don’t let ‘em roll the fenders and all that stuff, then instead of us having 15 cars we can get by with seven or eight cars. It’s going to be cheaper automatic if they can run the same car at Daytona and we can go to Charlotte and run the same car and not have to have a special car. If we can run the car at Martinsville and then go to Charlotte and run it, or take the Charlotte car and go run a road course, that’s where they’re going to save money if they would do it and do my suggestion. That’s the way I would do it. The car is the cheapest thing we show up at the racetrack with. Everything else costs more than the car.”

HOW DO SPONSORS VIEW CHEATING? “They caught me infringing just a little bit with soft tires and a big motor. At that time, we were working with STP and they loved it because it was in the newspaper and they were getting their name out there and they loved it. It would not work with Cheerios. They’re on the other side of the table. Sometimes it might be kind of a gray area there as far as your sponsor is concerned. One tolerated it one way and the other one wouldn’t tolerate it. Time is different now also because you’re talking about 20 years ago or something like that. I think a lot of things we did has been built off those legends of what people did or what they did to get by with just to make history out of it. Right now we’re making history for 10 years on down the road, but we’re really not concerned with it.”