Key element salvaged isn't a car number, but the King

It endured through six decades and 10 championships and 268 race victories, through wars and recessions and crises, all the while maintaining its position as a family business handed down from father to son. Over in Level Cross, N.C., outside the original white A-frame building that housed Petty Enterprises, you can still find patriarch Lee Petty's initials etched in the concrete. Like those scrawled letters, it seemed the greatest organization NASCAR has ever known would last forever.

Now, of course, that's no longer the case. Petty Enterprises is gone, folded into a Gillett Evernham Motorsports team that will soon take on a new name, relegated to so much of the history it helped create. The official announcement came Thursday night, but the mechanics of this absorption have been under way for more than a month.

Petty to GEM

• Petty, GEM announce deal
• Merger talks in final stages
• History of Petty Enterprises
• Andretti gave Petty last win
• Driving Experience lasting
• By the Numbers: Petty

Photo Gallery

• Petty Enterprises: Early Years
• Petty Enterprises: Later Years

Richard Petty and the No. 43 car he made famous now move on to a new organization. A few employees, like Robbie Loomis and Dale Inman, follow the King to a new home. The new four-car team will use GEM's facility in Statesville, N.C. Doomed by the current economic recession, virtually devoid of sponsorship, Petty Enterprises as we've always known it becomes a venerated part of NASCAR history, like North Wilkesboro Speedway and the Superbird.

It's a sad and somewhat frustrating day. People will surely point fingers at Boston Ventures, the investment group that bought majority interest in Petty Enterprises last year. The move was supposed to bring an infusion of capital and help the team return to prominence; after all, Richard Childress had used a similar tactic to rebuild his organization, which now sports three championship-caliber cars.

But at Petty, it didn't work. Neither did moving the team's base of operations from Level Cross to metro Charlotte, supposedly to attract the kind of crewmen Petty couldn't get in its ancestral, off-the-beaten-path home. Employees could only watch as sponsors, and then personnel, and then the entire organization slipped away.

"Once they did the merger [with Boston Ventures] we were told everything was good, they're going to bring in all this money into the company, and we'll start to invest in projects and development," said former Petty engineer Greg Case.

"But you could see pretty quickly that none of that happened. None of the things Robbie was telling us were coming about. We weren't all of the sudden investing and doing more testing. In fact, they actually started to cut back on testing and things. ... I didn't see, 'Oh, we're going to give you all this money so you can go out and win.' It became apparent that they were stating to cut costs. That made me wonder about things."

But perhaps no outside entity could have turned around Petty, given the circumstances. For a very long time, this was an organization able to live off the cachet of its name, able to keep and retain sponsors despite not having a race victory since John Andretti prevailed at Martinsville in 1999. The recession changed that.

In this financial environment, with corporations seeking maximum return on their advertising dollars (if they spend them at all) Petty Enterprises might very well still have foundered and sunk even if Richard and Kyle Petty -- and not people from Boston Ventures with no motorsports experience -- had remained at the helm.

So the No. 43 survives, even though deep down to many it won't feel like the real No. 43, like calling an event at Darlington Raceway the Southern 500 doesn't seem right unless it's on Labor Day weekend. Yet the key element salvaged here isn't a car, isn't a number. Let's face it, to many viewers of the sport today, the No. 43 -- despite its glorious history -- is only one of many vehicles struggling to keep up with those in the front.

No, the real saving grace here is that tall man in blue jeans and boots and a cowboy hat, the living embodiment of the soul of NASCAR. If this absorption of Petty Enterprises by GEM is the only way to ensure that the King will still be at the race track every weekend, signing autographs and shaking hands as he always has, then so be it.

Richard Petty is the only figure in the sport capable of galvanizing an audience of any age, of spanning the distance between the traditional die-hards and newer devotees, of transcending the multitude of divides among the faithful. People who never saw Petty behind the wheel of a race car will flock to him on a Sunday morning. He smiles and says hello as he always has, continuing to build the NASCAR fan base one person at a time, as he's done since the day 50 years ago when he first slid into a driver's seat.

If Petty Enterprises were to go away completely, and the No. 43 car were to be mothballed, and Richard Petty were to retire to his spread outside Randleman, N.C., with no reason to visit the race track anymore, then NASCAR would lose a piece of itself that could never be replaced.

"Nothing is going to change for me," Petty said in a statement announcing the merger. "I'm going to be at the track every weekend and really involved with the teams and drivers back at the shop."

Which is where NASCAR's greatest ambassador should be. Surely, Richard Petty wants to win again, wants to stand in Victory Lane behind his old No. 43 car, covered in confetti and champagne. But to the fan base at large, that's immaterial. What matters is that he'll still don that cowboy hat with the ostrich feathers, still slip on those black wraparound sunglasses, and continue to be the very public presence he's always been -- regardless of what name his race team is called by.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.