Kyle Petty and Bobby Labonte have combined for four top-10 finishes so far this season. Credit: Autostock

Q&A: Petty and Labonte

New teammates happy with how things are going so far

Through 10 weeks this season, Labonte and Petty are finding life as teammates to be just fine, thank you.

Petty finished eighth at Atlanta back in March, his first top-10 finish since last September at Dover. Meanwhile, Labonte has three top-10 finishes in the season's first 10 events, two more than he had at this point last season, his last with Joe Gibbs Racing.

The pair fielded questions from the media earlier this week.

Q: Bobby I know that you and your new crew chief had some good runs so far this season, what's the progress after 10 events together?

Inside the Numbers Petty Enterprises in the first 10 races of 2005 and 2006   2005 2006 Wins 0 0 Top-5s 0 1 Top-10s 1 4 Laps Led 8 15 Avg. Start 34.4 24.0 Avg. Finish 27.2 26.5

Labonte: Well, we're really excited about the way things have gone as far as our performance has been. 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, I mean, I think competitive wise, I think we're probably further ahead than we might have thought after the first couple of races because we've really turned it up since then, and, you know, we've been running in the top five, top 10, mainly top 10, top-five in Bristol and running in the top five Saturday night at Richmond.

But we're still fighting little things and little gremlins here and there that keep you finishing as good as we'd like to. That's part of it. It's hard, but you've just got to understand it. It's not easy but I think everybody has done a great job and [Crew chief] Todd [Parrott] especially has worked real hard to get everything going as good as possible.

Q: Kyle, I know that Darlington is one of those sites where you grew up playing in the infield as a child, and of course you've competed on the track for many, many years there now. Your thoughts on this exciting new tradition that's developing heading into the second consecutive Saturday night event there on Mother Day weekend?

Petty: Yeah, I'm a big Darlington fan. Darlington is, obviously, it's not one of my favorite tracks but I do enjoy going down there. And I think putting it the Saturday night before Mother's Day is a great place for it, a great place to start a tradition. Everybody, we went through the Labor Day thing and it was that race for so long that -- Darlington is a traditional style racetrack as far as the Nextel Cup circuit is concerned. You know, the old style, the style we grew up on, the old style fans have come to new and love.

So many of those are disappearing. We need to keep places like that on the schedule. And if we've got to find a place for it, then there's no better place than to have it on Saturday night and the night before Mother's Day. So as far as that goes, it's a good place to go, it's a fun place to go. The people are nice, wish they had a nicer racetrack down there, but it's still a nice place to go.

Q. Kyle, what is the place in NASCAR that in all your years coming up through this stuff what is a place that's not there anymore that maybe you miss the most?

Petty: There's two of them pretty equal, Rockingham and North Wilkesborough. I miss those two places. Those two places to me had a lot of history. You know, Wilkesborough and Junior Johnson are synonymous, and not to go back to Junior's hometown to me was a big deal when we quit racing there, and there were always great races there.

I don't think you ever run across any drivers that didn't enjoy going to Wilkesborough and racing. It was just a fun racetrack to race on.

And the same thing with Rockingham. Rockingham, no matter how bad your car drove or worked, you could find a place on the racetrack to halfway make it work. You might not be the fastest car there, but they run up next to the wall, the run on the bottom, they run in the middle. They were great races that came down to the very, very last lap a lot of times. And then there were blowout races, so it was a typical racetrack, but it was a good place.

To me those are just two places that in my lifetime, in the 20 or 30 years that I've driven a race car that if I could put back on the schedule, I'd put both of those back on the schedule.

Q. How close is the 43 to getting back in Victory Lane? Are you real close or is that still a kind of a long road to hoe there?

Petty: I think we're a lot closer than what we anticipated when the season started. I think what's happened is this. Bringing Robby in and then Bobby and Todd have gelled together a lot faster than what we as a company thought.

I think Bobby probably thought he and Todd had worked together right off the bat, but they have come together a lot quicker than what we thought. We thought it would take us to the halfway point of the year to try to get almost every race under our belt before you really begin to see some progress.

I think what's happened is that Bobby and those guys, Bobby and Todd and the 43 team have taken off at such a fast pace, you know, where they might not finish in the top five or top 10 but by God, they are running in the top five and top 10 every week. And the reason they are not finishing in the top five and top 10 is because the weak part of the teams are showing up.

And we never said we had the strongest teams in the world. We have to build stronger organization and stronger teams, and that's what we did with Bobby, that's what we did with Robby and that's what we've done with Todd. We're making mistakes and taking ourselves out of races in a lot of cases.

We didn't really anticipate that part showing up maybe until the second half of the year, and we thought we could have time to fix it by the time we got there. But really, you know, the 43 team, and even the 45 team, we've made mistakes that have relegated us from being a 10th- or 12th-place car to being a 40th-place car sometimes, and we can only look at ourselves in the mirror and say, that was our fault.

I think in the end, the 43 car, when everything clicks the way it should click, then, yeah, they can win races and they can win races right now. Bobby came from 35th or 36th at Richmond 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.

So I think they are a lot, lot farther along and I think they are establishing themselves as the team. And that's what we said when we brought Bobby over. The 43 team is Petty Enterprises. That's our brand. That's who we are, that's who we are always going to be, and we have to do everything we can to put the 43 car and Labonte back in Victory Lane.

Q. Is going to Darlington's with today's configuration of cars tougher than it was, say, 10 years ago?

Labonte: Yes and no, looking at ten years ago, it was repaved, so that helped out a lot. I think the paving job has just deteriorating so much, that I don't care what you go with, it's going to be a handful after about ten laps anyway. But I'd say with what we have now, I mean, I'm more excited about it now than I guess I would have been before they repaved it last time with the cars that we had then. You know, these cars are going to probably for me drive better than those did back then, I would think. So I don't think there's anything wrong with going with what we've got today.

Petty: I don't know, I've struggled with the place, from the time I got there. But Bill Kaiser was the PR guy when he ran the place and everything down there, they came up with that slogan "Too Tough to Tame", and I had a T-shirt made up that said "Too Cheap to Pave" because I didn't like the place, period, whether they paved it or didn't pave it. It really doesn't make any difference to me. I've struggled with the place.

Q. Bobby, a question for you, and that is about the tires and the mix up on the car. It was amazing to see Jeff Gordon's guys struggle to find out what was wrong, sparkplug problem for someone else, small things are so important, can you talk about how that could happen?

Labonte: I think it's just a pressure-packed sport and there's guys that are doing everything they can do. I've been on that side of it before. Man, I left a water hose off from Jerry's drink bottle one time and he drained all the water out and he had no water, and I'm like, that bad move on my part won't happen again.

You know, that was way back then it probably wasn't as huge of a deal as it is today because there's more competition. But that's why there is, you know -- that's why mistakes can be made just because there's more competition out there, so you're at a zero-tolerance mistake level. We're in zero-tolerance sport. We cannot make mistakes, because there's 40 other teams that if they don't make mistakes, they pounce on you, you know what I mean.

So it's going to happen. It happened last Saturday night, it will happen again this Saturday night, I bet you, you know what I mean, somebody is going to make a mistake. That's just some of the things that you have to swallow and try not to do.