The King on the Car of Tomorrow: "I'm sold on it because of the safety deal." Credit: Autostock

Conversation: R. Petty

Richard Petty won 200 races and seven Cup championships, so he knows more about NASCAR and race cars than most.

He took time during a break between practices at California Speedway to discuss the controversial Car of Tomorrow that NASCAR plans to introduce next season.

You're one of the few owners that have gone forward with building a Car of Tomorrow. Why is that?

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Petty: We went ahead and did it just because of the safety deal. Working with NASCAR and working with Dodge, if this is going to happen, let's put our two cents worth in. We feel that by working with them, as they come up with an idea and we come up with an idea, then together they get more ideas. If you just get one idea out of the corner, then everybody else cuts them down. If everybody is involved they can't cut them down. That's why they want more teams involved in it.

But some owners say they're not going to spend the money building the cars until they get NASCAR's final product, saying it's a waste to build something only to have to tear it apart and start over?

ALSO A five-year project, the Car of Tomorrow offers important safety and performance upgrades. It also addresses cost reduction, providing teams with a more efficient car to produce and tune.  •   Complete story, click here DAYTONA TEST NASCAR made a giant step toward a hoped-for "universal car" for use in the Nextel Cup Series when Brett Bodine tested the latest Car of Tomorrow prototype at Daytona Jan. 12.  •   Complete story, click here ATLANTA TEST At Atlanta last fall, Petty Enterprises, Richard Childress Racing, Roush Racing, Hendrick Motorsports and Dale Earnhardt Incorporated tested versions of the Car of Tomorrow.   •   Complete story, click here DEBUT SET FOR 2007 NASCAR has announced that the Car of Tomorrow will begin Nextel Cup Series competition in 2007. Teams will use the newly designed race car for 16 events next season, beginning with the spring race at Bristol.  •   Complete coverage, click here

Petty: Then they're going to complain because this wasn't done like they wanted it, or they think it needs to be done that way. So they're not really helping the process. NASCAR came out and said, "Help us with this process. We're not the only ones that's got ideas.'' Two-thirds of the ideas on these cars, probably 90 percent of the ideas, came from the crews and drivers and mechanics and NASCAR picked them up.

You talk a lot about not having as much money as some big teams. Is there a concern you're putting so much money into this now without knowing the final product?

Petty: We've already built two cars. After we built the first car they changed everything. It's an exercise good for me and my boys from the standpoint of working with NASCAR. We can throw in some ideas. There's a lot of ideas that came from us, Junior Johnson. That's really the reason they wanted people to help.

It seems like there's a lot of people that want a new car. They're pretty happy with what they've got and want to stay with it.

Does the boxier style remind you of some of the cars you drove back in the day?

Petty: It's a whole lot more like the truck deal as far as when they get together and run. The way the cars are now, they're so aerodynamic. They're great by themselves. They use air to keep them on the track. When you get in a pack of cars there's no air pushing those cars down and it's hard for them to race because the cars are skipping all around the racetrack. With the square cars, there's not a lot of wind holding the things down when you're by yourself, so when you don't have wind in a crowd it don't change the car as much. You've got to keep the competition where people can race with each other instead of just running with each other.

Some say it's not a pretty car, saying the rear wing they're looking at is getting too far from the street car. Do you agree?

Petty: You go out and watch cars go up and down the road. You never see a car with a straight spoiler like we've got. But you see from time to time little wings. It looks more stock to me than what we've got.

No, this is not a pretty car. This is not a pretty car we're running now, but we've got used to it.

How much does it cost you to build one of these cars versus today's car?

Inside the Numbers Richard Petty's dominance from 1967-75 Rank Category No. 1 Starts 352 1 Wins 129 1 Second place 63 1 Top-fives 248 1 Top-10s 277 1 Poles 70 1 Laps 98,955 1 Laps led 33,474 1 Lead-lap finishes 193 1 Average start 3.8 1 Average finish 6.7 1 Points 82,690.1 1 Earnings $2,369,396 1 Championship 5

Petty: Somewhere around $80,000 to $100,000 a car. It's no different than what we've got today from that standpoint. It's still got four wheels, a chassis, roll bars and sheet metal. Just because it's shaped different don't mean it cost more to get it done.

One of the big deals is right now we've got 15 to 20 cars and once we get the new car we can't use them anymore. But the deal is, they're building new cars all the time. They're replacing these cars because they keep finding something better. So what's the difference?

And right now we've got special cars for Daytona, special cars for short tracks, special cars for intermediate tracks and road races. If they do a square car, then the car will be able to run everywhere, so you won't need as many cars. I don't think that's sunk in with the majority of people. Instead of having 20 cars you can get away with 8 or 10.

Some owners aren't buying that, saying they'll still need 17 to 20 cars.

Petty: That's their prerogative. But they don't need it. They won't have to have it. Here's how I look at it. If we've got one car we can work on it 24 hours a day. If we have two cars we can't work on them but 12 hours a day. If we've got 12 cars you ain't working on them but two hours a day. So a lot of times you don't make the car better. If you build a car at the beginning of the season it's no better car at the end of the season. But if you've just got five or six cars, you're going to work on them all the time. Those cars are going to work better at the end of the year than the beginning of the year because you're working on them all the time.

It's got to be such a big commercial deal that they're running these cars off basically like you do in Detroit. They build them and run them through. If they don't like them they kick them out the back door and build another one.

Sounds like you should be the poster child for the Car of Tomorrow.

Petty: I'm sold on it because of the safety deal. I've seen all the different things they've done to the car. We went through the conversion in 1981. Up until 1980 all the cars were 115-116 inch square base. Then they went to the intermediate cars, 110-inch base cars. We went to Daytona, they didn't have an advance car. Everybody went down there, they didn't work real good. They just put more spoiler on them and they worked good and everybody accepted them.

They just made a change. They didn't have to drift into it. At that time the best teams didn't have but three or four cars. So it didn't make a lot of difference and they didn't look at it from that financial part of it. Now they look at is as we've got $2 million worth of cars sitting over here in the corner that we can't use.

But there's so many cars that they can use. ... We've got these guys hired, and they're going to do something. Whether they're working on this year's model or next year's model, we've still got the same amount of expense.

Will the Car of Tomorrow help less funded teams, including Petty Enterprises, be more competitive?

Petty: Yeah, it will. We won't need all of those cars, so the expenses wouldn't be there. If you've got to have 20 cars, most everybody thinks you've got to have 20 rear ends. If you don't have but 10, you don't have to have but 10 rear ends.

The changeover I can't see is going to cost you a whole lot because you're building new cars anyway. Two or three years down the road it's going to be cheaper because you don't need that much equipment to maintain a smaller fleet of cars.

The Car of Tomorrow aside, are you happy with the way things are going with Petty Enterprises with all the changes you've made?

Petty: It's going to take a while for our new people to learn what we've got, what they can do with it, and also learn to work together. It's sort of like going to an all-star game. You've got the best players, but a lot of times the games are no good because the people haven't been around each other long enough to learn how to work with each other.

We're the same way here. We've got what we believe is the core people. They've just got to get used to each other, learn the new system. It takes a while to make all that work.