OT: Are you involved with the Victory Junction Gang camp too?
RP: I’m partly involved with that. Kyle spends a lot of time with that – he and his wife. I do what I can -- make appearances for it and talk to sponsors and fans.
My dad started the racing business and over a period of time I wound up with the whole thing. We’ve got Petty Enterprises, The Richard Petty Driving Experience. Kyle started the Kyle Petty motorcycle ride for charity. Then he started the Camp, and it has got to be a big, big deal. Those are our main focuses.
OT: You rebuilt the race team somewhat last year. What is the goal for it in 2007?
RP: We stopped the bleeding. We’re starting in the healing process for sure. The cars have stepped up a lot this year (2006). We didn’t win any races, but if you look at 2005 against 2006, you see a marked improvement.
OT: What did it take?
RP: We brought Robbie Loomis back. He took over the day-to-day managing. What happened is that over time I turned it over to Kyle. He was really in there digging; then he got involved in the motorcycle ride. Then he got so involved in the Camp. He has to make personal appearances for all the sponsors, so he couldn’t be here day-to-day-to-day. We needed a manager to do that.
So we brought Robbie in. Then we looked around and we needed someone to drive the #43. We got Bobby Labonte, which is a great asset. Bobby had been driving for Gibbs and they’d had pretty good success from time to time.
We really didn’t know where our cars were at. Kyle had been driving them all along, and we brought in other drivers from time to time. They were good drivers, but they couldn’t consistently win. Bobby can win any day if we have the right circumstances and right equipment. He was really able to help us improve the breed.
Robbie had been with Hendrick Motorsports so he knew some of the shortfallings that we had, and Bobby knew some of the other shortfallings that we had. We could not see the forest for the trees – we do it every day and we think its right, but we had nothing to compare it to.
So they come in and open up our departments – the cars got better as far as mechanical-wise and aero-wise. There was no magic bullet. To help 10% they had to take ten different departments and get 1% improvement out of each one of them. Hopefully that will continue on into next year.