Richard Petty pulls it off.....now can the King win again on the NASCAR tour?

   Richard Petty (L) and Ford boss Jamie Allison. A new bunch of business partners now own and run Petty's NASCAR operation, taking over what's left of the George Gillett fiasco....but Petty has only three Cup tour wins in some 25 years, so will this new deal turn things around? (Photo: Autostock)
   

   By Mike Mulhern
   mikemulhern.net

    Of course just how relevant Richard Petty himself is to the sport of NASCAR racing these days – his last Cup tour win was in 1999, with John Andretti, and Petty's various NASCAR teams have won only three tour races since 1984.
   Nevertheless, there is still mystique in the Petty name and legacy.
   How well that may translate to success again, though, is up in the air.
   Gillett, the international sports tycoon who once owned the Montreal Canadiens and the Liverpool soccer team, among other items, arrived in NASCAR in 2007 at the invitation of Ray Evernham, who was then looking for a business partner for his then Dodge-based NASCAR operation.
    Gillett worked for a long time to persuade Petty to join his operation, and Petty finally did, and the Evernham-Gillett team morphed to Richard Petty Motorsports, albeit with Petty himself holding only a minor stake. While all the financial details are still murky, it appears Gillett 'bought' the operation with bank-borrowed money, leveraging it, and then when the economy turned sour Gillett was in trouble.
    First, Gillett sold the Canadiens. Then he was forced to sell Liverpool.
    Now he has apparently been ousted from RPM.
    Buying into the 'new' RPM are two investors, Andrew Murstein and Douglas Bergeron.
    Murstein's money comes from his family's New York City taxi cab business: (NASDAQ:TAXI).
    Bergeron runs VeriFone (NYSE: PAY), a mobile credit card system operation; his stake in RPM comes from his DGB Investments subsidiary.
    How much of a share in the new business Petty himself has is not clear.
    Murstein is not a new name in this NASCAR game; he has been looking at investing in this sport for several years. He seems to be getting in for a discount.
    Forbes annually 'values' sports franchises, based on some formula of sponsorship and assets. And the Evernham-Petty-Yates Racing conglomerate was priced at around $100 million a few years back. Currently however, the operation is clearly valued at far, far less.
    And it's not clear whatever happened to the Boston Ventures operation, which Petty once sold a share of his family's racing business to a few years back.
    That the Petty team was in trouble was evident last fall, when Gillett last talked at length with the NASCAR media, and said he was negotiating with some Middle Eastern businessmen to support his sports empire.
    Things appeared to get worse this past spring, when Kasey Kahne, the lead driver in RPM's four-man roster, announced he would be leaving at the end of the season and moving to the Rick Hendrick Chevrolet camp in 2011. Budweiser, Kahne's sponsor, followed suit eventually, announcing a move to the Richard Childress operation for 2011.
    Petty last fall, when Gillett put together a merger with Ford's Doug Yates and Jack Roush, was forced to release his entire engine operation.
    Over the summer it appeared evident that Petty's four-team operation would have to be pared to two teams for next season. But when Marcos Ambrose signed on to run for Petty in 2011, there was still no particular evidence that things were going so rapidly downhill. AJ Allmendinger signed a new contract to continue in Petty's own 43 next year, with the presumption that Best Buy would continue as sponsor. The Best Buy backing, however, became tenuous when the Gillett financial problems became so clear.
    Paul Menard in August announced he was leaving RPM to join Childress next season, another financial blow.
    And Elliott Sadler earlier this month announced he would be moving to Kevin Harvick's Nationwide operation.
    At Martinsville, Va., last month things blew up. Kahne, after brake problems at Charlotte, abruptly quit, or split. And RPM's very existence appeared a day-to-day question.
   Petty himself went out into the market place looking for new backers. And just how the dissolution of the debt-ridden Gillett operation was handled is not clear.
   But now Petty is down to two teams for 2011, with Ambrose and Allmendinger, with the operation continuing to be run by Robby Loomis, under the Ford blanket, and with Petty himself nominally in charge of things.
    Still, a number of crew were let go at the end of the season.
    Petty, in making the announcement Monday, called it "a great day for me, my family, our fans and our wonderful sponsors."
    Both Murstein and Bergeron appear to have significant market value, in the billions of dollars, to tap. And they were apparently able to pay off the $70 million to $90 million in debt that RPM-Gillett was saddled with for a significant discount. Details were not immediately available.
    For Ford Motor Company the survival of RPM is a big plus, not only for the name but also for the subsidiary engineering work the Petty operation provides. 
    So Jamie Allison, Ford's racing boss, said he was "elated" at the news.
    And Allison said he was confident Murstein and Bergeron would be able to handle the financial situation:  "two men whose knowledge and understanding of what it takes to be successful will serve RPM well in the future."