Kyle's Take: With this big TV promotion, just how outspoken will Richard's son be this season?

 Kyle Petty (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR) 

   By Mike Mulhern
   mikemulhern.net

   DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.
   No, it won't be Kyle Petty TV, but the third-generation racer, now a year out of the driver's seat, will have a much more prominent role on the tube on NASCAR Sundays this season....and, given NASCAR's crackdown on the media, as well as the nation-wide loss of much of what has been mainstream print media, what will the usually outspoken Petty have to offer this year.
   Petty of course is no stranger to TV; he's been doing some bits the past few years, plus an anchor-analyst's role during Turner's six-week mid-summer NASCAR run.
   But this season he's been promoted to three hours of race day coverage. Two hour pre-race; an hour post-race.
   Let's see, times 38 events, that's like well over 100 hours, close to 134 hours he reckons.
   Kyle TV.
   And once he gets started, there is no off switch....well, at least not till it's time to jump on the bikes and make the cross-country summer run for his Victory Junction Gang camp: this year Palm Springs to Vegas to northern Utah, down to Durango, to Amarillo and Texarkana, and Philadelphia, Miss., by Birmingham, up to Chattanooga, over the mountains to Asheville, and then on home.
  
   NASCAR's sudden move to embrace change may have caught people by surprise the past two weeks.
   "Am I surprised? No....and yes," Petty says.
    "I'm not surprised, because NASCAR felt things had gotten to the point where they needed to step in and do something. So call this the Obama-NASCAR stimulus package for 2010: 'change these three or four things to help stimulate the sport.'
   "However, yes, I am surprised, because NASCAR had tightened things down so much the last four or five years....and that they are now willing to relinquish something.
   "It was getting tighter and tighter and tighter, to the point you couldn't even breath. It wasn't a restrictor plate at Daytona and Talladega; it was a restrictor plate on the whole sport."

   Hmmmm. Petty, though known for speaking his mind, no matter the fallout, is replacing equally outspoken Jimmy Spencer on Sunday TV.
   How to read that?
    Is Spencer being demoted because he was too critical of NASCAR?
    Is Petty being plugged in, with orders to tone things down, to accentuate the positive (another of NASCAR's new media game plans)?
    Will Petty come into this role on a leash, effectively neutered?
    The veteran racer laughs. "Look at me. How long have you known me?"
    Since before winning that ARCA race back in his stock car debut in 1980.
   "I don't think I've ever been neutered. I'm going to say what I say. You might not like it. And I always say I'll stand behind whatever I say for at least seven days, and then I reserve the right to change my mind.
   "But there are a lot of positive things in this sport, tons of positive things.
   "But when I turn on Fox News or NBC or CBS or ABC nightly news, it's not a positive newscast. They're telling me everything that's wrong in the world.
   "Now if you want the Positive News Network, that's fine.
   "But in any sport, there are always issues that are not positive. And you can't ignore that. You have to speak about it...because it brings the whole context of the sport together.
   "If I just sit up here and say 'X is great this year, and Y is great this year....' I'm ignoring a whole bunch of issues that dovetail into that. 'Oh, it could be better if this were better, but I can't mention this.'
   "You going to have to mention that. Because what we've done – all of us, NASCAR and the media – is given the race fans so much information that they're not stupid.
    "They are incredibly smart. They are incredibly intelligent.
    "And they all have BS meters. And those BS meters go off when you just try to spin things your way.
    "You've got to give them the full picture.
    "Used to be you could go to North Wilkesboro and report that Richard Petty and Bobby Allison had one of the greatest races of all time (here referring to the infamous 1972 season)....and not say that they wrecked each other and got out and fought each other, and that Uncle Maurice pounded Bobby's head and his brother's head in the ground.....
   "Now you wouldn't read any of that. But if you were there, you saw it all.
   "But now we tell them all that. We tell them what Montoya says (like at Indianapolis last summer, at Homestead last fall), we tell them what Tony says. And the fans get it on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday...
   "So if we go to the next track the next Friday singing 'Follow the yellow-brick road,' 'everything is hunky-dory,' they know better than that. Four days earlier those guys had Glocks out shooting at each other.
   "These fans are smarter than that.
   "You can talk about the positive things, you can be positive...but you still have to throw in factually what's going on.
   "Now opinion is opinion, and you can't stop my opinion and I can't stop your opinion.
    "But if the facts are not always sunshine and popcorn, it's a fact and I can't get around that.
    "I can't get around that the economy is not in the right place right now, I can't around that unemployment is high right now, I can't get around that we're in two wars right now.
   "And those things touch this sport and every sport and everyone's daily lives.
   "If we chose to ignore it, race fans think we're idiots: 'What are those people living in their own little bubble?'
   "Yeah, I know NASCAR gets on to some people sometimes. They ever get on to you?"
   And Petty laughs.
  
  

  

   Petty's role in all this?
   "I look at TV differently," Petty goes on. "Nobody tunes in TV on Sundays to listen to Kyle Petty; they tune in to watch Jeff Gordon.
    "Here's the way TV works for me: Nobody goes to the Louvre to look at the frames; they go to look at the art. I do TV; I'm the frame. I can only frame what the picture is. Sometimes I get the Mona Lisa, and sometimes I get finger-painting from a three-year-old.
    "All I can do is frame it.
   "Now I've got to put the best frame on it I can. But if you're tuning in to hear what Kyle Petty says, go watch Cops; it's great in reruns."
   
   So is this a make-it or break-it year for NASCAR?
   "I don't think that NASCAR is in a position yet to have a make-or-break year," Petty says. "When you've been in business this long, 60 years, you've got enough history and enough things going on.
   "Yes, things might not be good. Cash flow, attendance, dada-da-dada, might be down. But it's just a low spot. It's not going to break you.
   "Look at drivers and their slumps. Remember when everybody wrote off Dale Earnhardt when he had a couple bad years? Remember when Mark Martin was written off because he'd had a couple bad years?
    "Maybe NASCAR is just in a Mark Martin-Dale Earnhardt slump and it will come back stronger on the back side.
    "There are so many factors in the sport now.....It used to be that we could just point to what was going on on the race track, that's all you cared about. That's how simple the sport was.
   "But now the sport has grown so big there are so many other factors than just what goes on on the track that affect the sport.
    "From a NASCAR perspective, they can say 'Well, I can fix some of this but I can't fix everything.' So they're trying to fix what they can touch.
   "So I say 'Good for NASCAR:' for stepping in and saying 'We can fix these things, so let's move the bubble here. We can't fix the economy, but we can do this.'"

    And Petty's take on NASCAR's push toward 'parity' with common template cars?
   NASCAR execs have started moving – with the new Nationwide cars – toward allowing car makers to put a little more brand identity in their stockers. And there are indications that move may accelerate, with the next-generation car-of-tomorrow, which Detroit execs are already discussing with NASCAR.
   That certainly seems like a good move.  Every Daytona 500 car, underneath the paint and decals, looks the same.
    Daytona's SpeedWeeks used to have different kinds of surprises, like 1981 when Bobby Allison found an old Pontiac Lemans on a car lot, noticed it was legal in the rule book (back when there were all sorts of cars okayed for NASCAR racing), and brought one of those fastbacks to Daytona...while everyone else, on the official factory plans, had to run the official notchbacks. So Allison had the fastest cars during SpeedWeeks, only to get outfoxed by crew chief Dale Inman, who gambled on pit road the final stop and helped Richard Petty win.
   With common template cars, no such surprises any more.
   Parity.
   To which Petty snorts "Parity sucks."
   "If I told every reporter in here 'You get a three-inch column, go write,' every story is going to look the same. That's tying your hands.
   "That (common template cars) ties your hands.
   "I'm not saying it hurts the sport or helps the sport.
   "But I want to see somebody humiliating somebody out there on Sunday. Like Rusty used to, like Mark.
   "However I don't know how to go backwards...so I'm not going to criticize the car. I don't know how you can go back and capture some of that."
   Still modern computer simulations should be able to allow for similar aerodynamics numbers despite different body styles. Let Detroit be Detroit?
     "I don't think NASCAR is ever going back to the days when the Pontiacs got a six-inch spoiler, and Chevys got a five-inch spoiler, and Fords got a 5-1/2-inch spoiler (because of aerodynamic differences)," Petty said. "Those days are gone; they won't open themselves up to that again.
   "But those were fun days, because we all had something to complain about and you guys had something to write about."
   
  
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  Kyle Petty always did march to his own drummer (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)