Ten races into the season, the big picture suggests that two-car Petty Enterprises has not shown improvement since luring several high-profile racers to its legendary team.
Former Cup champion Bobby Labonte is 27th in the standings, just two spots ahead of where Jeff Green finished in the car last year, and Kyle Petty is running 33rd, six spots below where he ended in 2005.
Labonte and Petty have a big problem with the big picture. They said the 57-year-old team – which has won just one Cup race since 1999 and only three since 1983 – is on the verge of visiting Victory Lane again.
“The 43 car, when everything clicks the way it should click, then, yeah, they can win races and they can win races right now,” Petty said of Labonte’s team. “Bobby comes from 35th or 36th at Richmond (Va., last Saturday) to run in the top five most of the night.
“When you look at driving from fifth or sixth in Atlanta to lead the race before the engine broke, and things like that, we haven’t seen that type of performance out of Petty Enterprises in the last 20 years, and I’ll go back to when Richard Petty drove the cars.”
Richard Petty, the team’s owner, is NASCAR’s winningest driver with 200 victories. But his team hasn’t been competitive since 1983, when Petty won three races in 30 starts. He failed to win a race during his final seven seasons, and he retired in 1992.
Over the winter, Petty hired two former Cup champion crew chiefs in Robbie Loomis and Todd Parrott. Loomis, Petty’s director of race operations, won the 2001 title with driver Jeff Gordon; and Parrott, now Kyle Petty’s crew chief, helped Dale Jarrett win the championship in 1999.
Labonte, the 2000 Cup champion, replaced Green in the famed No. 43 car.
“We’re really excited about the way things have gone,” Labonte said. “We said at the beginning of the year we’re going to have our up and downs, and I think we’ve had that. But overall, competitive-wise, I think we’re probably further ahead than we might have thought. … We’ve been running in the top five, top 10, but we’re still fighting little things and little gremlins here and there that keep you from finishing as good as we’d like to.”
Biffle pleased
It has been a tough season for 2005 Cup runner-up Greg Biffle, who has been a factor in almost every race of the season but is 20th in the standings.
Biffle has led at least one lap in eight of 10 races and leads all drivers with 837 miles led. He is fourth in driver rating (99.1), but it wasn’t until Saturday at Richmond that he raced without some encounter with bad luck. He ended fourth.
“It feels like a win,” Biffle said on NASCAR’s website. “I was pumping my arms up in the air. We certainly needed this. We’ve been running like this all season, but we finally made it to the checkered flag.”
Slugger suspended
Richard “Slugger” Labbe, crew chief for Jarrett’s No. 88 Ford, has been fined $25,000 and suspended until June 7 for failing technical inspection after Saturday’s race. His primary violation was using an “unapproved rear sway bar mounting for use other than anti-roll.”
Jarrett and team owner Robert Yates also were penalized 25 driver and owner points.
Denver team 25th again
Denver-based Furniture Row Racing, a rookie Cup team, tied a career-best finish of 25th at Richmond.
Owner Barney Visser of Cherry Hills and Kenny Wallace gained two and four positions, respectively, in the owner and driver standings. Visser is 42nd and Wallace 43rd after competing in four races.
Mike Chambers can be reached at 303-820-5453 or mchambers@denverpost.com.
