Richard Petty survives to fight another day!

  The King is getting his mojo back (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  

   By Mike Mulhern
   mikemulhern.net

   And the year had opened with such promise. Kasey Kahne won his 150 at Daytona during SpeedWeeks, in his first run in a Petty Ford, after so many seasons with Dodge. And the technological tools that the former Ray Evernham bunch brought to the game were formidable.
   But then in April Kahne suddenly revealed he would be bailing out at the end of the season. And sponsor Bud too decided to move on. And sports financier George Gillett's woes mounted, leaving the Petty operation reeling, careening toward disaster.
   For several weeks late it looked like the entire Petty organization, a NASCAR fixture since 1949, was on the verge of complete collapse.
   The nightmares still linger.
   "I never thought it would come to a point in our sport where the biggest race for me was just making sure the cars got to the track," Robbie Loomis, the Petty team boss, said with a sigh.
   Money was so tight, the team was running just day to day in September, October and November.
   Sponsors hung on the ropes. The four-team operation had to be pared to two. Elliott Sadler was gone, Kahne was gone, Paul Menard was gone.
   Only AJ Allmendinger remained. And Marcos Ambrose, who had made an August commitment to join Petty was clearly sweating that decision.

  
Robbie Loomis (R) (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  

   For Loomis, who has been a Petty man for some 20 years, with a few years out to help Jeff Gordon win a championship at Rick Hendrick's, the past five seasons have been a rollercoaster. First, the Petty partnership sale to Boston Ventures. Then the Gillett thing. Now a new deal – with NYC taxi cab magnate
Andy Murstein (Medallion Financial Group) and West Coast man Doug Bergeron (DGB Investments/VeriFone).
   Loomis concedes now that those hopeful plans for expansion back in 2006 "never really came to fruition. There are a lot of reasons that go into that, a lot of business decisions that had to be made.
    "But this is a new starting place for us. And what I see in Andy Murstein and Andy Bergeron is that they have a real commitment to the sport, they are passionate about sports in general. I think Andy has tickets to just about every sports event imaginable. Football, baseball, basketball.
   "Andy has followed NASCAR for four or five years....and I kidded him the other night at dinner, after watching him study the menu for so long, that now I understand why it took so long to make the commitment to go racing."
   Mursteen is even talking about reviving plans for a New York City Speedway, which should certainly endear him to the NASCAR Frances.

   Still Petty and Loomis and these guys have been through the wringer, and it may take a while to get over the shellshock of 2010.
   "You never what's going to play out when you go into these business partnerships. Just keep your eyes wide open and work hard.... " Loomis says.
   "With Marcus and AJ we have drivers with real potential, and it's up to us now to surround them with the right people and make the right pit calls, so they can do the job."  

  
  

   What happens next?
   The Daytona 500 of course.
   "The only thing that's going to matter is the last 20 laps," Loomis says.
   But how to get to that point?
   Crew chief Todd Parrott says with clear determination, Allmendinger and Ambrose – two wild and crazy drivers, who have had a few run-ins before – will have to learn to play well together. "You two guys are going to have to learn to work together...and if you don't, we're going to have some issues," Parrott says.
    Loomis says that at Daytona down the stretch, Allmendinger and Ambrose will have to work at figuring out how to put themselves in the right position.
   "When I was at Rick Hendrick's, with Jeff Gordon, there were maybe three races (at Daytona and Talladega) where Jimmie (Johnson) and Chad (Knaus) finished second to us...it used to drive Chad crazy," Loomis said. "But it wasn't me; it was that Jeff knew what to do, how to put himself in that situation where Jimmie wound up pushing him."
   

   

    One big issue with the two-car draft is that the two men have to swap positions after a few laps, and that swap has to be remarkably smooth or the two-car draft can lose a lot of speed....as Jeff Burton and Matt Kenseth showed at Talladega last fall, when a botched switch cost them dearly.
   "Based on what I saw during testing the Daytona 500 is going to come down to the last five or four laps,' Parrott says. "You'll have two guys who try to break away from the field...and they'll hope they can run nose-to-tail long enough to get to victory lane – and the guy running second, doing the pushing, is probably going to win the race. Like we saw last year, with Kevin Harvick and Jamie McMurray."
   At the Daytona tests teammates were working well together, the Joe Gibbs guys, the Childress guys, the Hendrick guys. But Loomis is skeptical that such teamwork will actually pan out in the 500 itself: "That stuff works well in practice, but in the race a lot of that goes out the window. You can make all the plans in the world, but when you get out there in the race, if one guy makes the wrong move, things can change in a hurry.
   "And a two-car draft can carry so much momentum that you're not going to be able to pull down there and block them."

   
   

    The 2011 season will feature a number of new twists, from NASCAR.
    "The fuel things will change the game a lot," Loomis says.
    "There are going to be a lot of mistakes made on pit road this year," Parrott said. "Because it's going to be tricky to get these cars full of gas."
    Because of the new gas-can systems.
    First, there is new fuel, E-15, ethanol-laced. More power perhaps, but less fuel mileage. And fuel mileage may well be critical at Daytona in the 500. Plus, while burning a piston, by leaning the fuel mixture, hasn't been much of an issue lately, it could be an issue this time around. And Daytona's weather is notoriously fickle, with ocean breezes changing humidity in a flash, and thus upsetting carefully tuned carburetor settings.
   Second, a new fueling system, self-contained, designed to prevent spills. However at Daytona last week during testing the new fuel system was being roundly criticized, and fuel spills in the garage, under restrained conditions, were epidemic. "Does anybody like the new fuel system?" Parrott asks rhetorically. "No.
    "There is too much fuel being spilled.
    "Now it's like anything else – in time we'll get all the bugs worked out and they'll tweak the rules and we'll love it."
   But at the moment....Parrott says the Daytona 500 may well be lost on pit road, by gas men making major mistakes: "The team that wins the Daytona 500 is going to be the team that takes the time to do things right on pit road and doesn't make mistakes."
   Loomis: "The gas men are now the most valuable part of the pit crew, even more so than the tire changers.
   "And I think the new fueling things will affect the way you call the race itself – that you'll be trying each stop to figure out how to get as much gas in as possible."

   Engines and horsepower and gas mileage? During the Daytona test Chevy teams, Toyota teams and Dodge teams all shared the spotlight during drafting. And Ford seemed a little off the pace.
   But Saturday, after Ford's top engine man Doug Yates studied things and made some tweaks, suddenly Greg  Biffle was turning the fastest single-car laps of the week.
   So the battle for the Daytona 500 pole could well be Biffle versus Chevy's Clint Bowyer.
   But what to expect from the Petty guys? That's not clear.
   "We didn't bring AJ's primary 500 car, because we just wanted to concentrate on drafting and we knew we'd be beating that car up pretty good (in bump drafting)," Loomis said. "And Marcus didn't do any drafting.
   "But with Todd Parrott's success on the superspeedways, he kept chipping away at the details and got that car running pretty good. By the time we put the Roush Yates horsepower in it, we'll be fine."
  
   But Loomis at least has two teams to work with, a couple of new financial backers who appear to have the wherewithal to play this game, and Petty himself back in the picture.
   It was painfully obvious during the Gillett years that, while Petty's name was on the front door, his own input was scant.
   Petty talked about that, and how that had now changed, during Wednesday's stop on the week-long Charlotte Media Tour.
   Yet while there is more confidence within and surrounding this operation now than there was only a few weeks ago, there is still an air of cautiousness here.
   For Loomis, having to drop nearly 100 crewmen when forced to downsize from four Cup teams to two, appears to have been all but traumatic. He'd worked so hard to put together a good operation....
   One part of the pain – not only losing Kahne but Kahne taking much of his crew and crew chief Kenny Francis with him, over to Team Red Bull, an interim stop on the way to Rick Hendrick's in 2012.
   "But we've retained a lot of good talent," Loomis said. "AJ's team probably has the most common members in place. We were able to retain a lot of people for Marcus' deal too.
   "What hurts the most was losing Kasey so early in the year...and that started the ripples, and all the emotions, through the business.
   "Having a guy like AJ, who tightened up his seat belts, as I say, and took the steering wheel in his teeth, really helped."
   Well, yeah, but remember Pocono......
   It will be interesting to see if Loomis and Parrott can keep these two drivers under rein.