What is this world coming to?  By that I mean, did you ever envision a time when Petty Enterprises would be without a sponsor? Or when the Wood Brothers are struggling to make races? Or when Morgan-McClure Motorsports shut its doors for lack of sponsorship?
Say it isn’t so.
Yet, just last week, General Mills announced it was taking Cheerios and Betty Crocker and all its other products across the way from Petty to Richard Childress Racing for 2009, leaving the King and Kyle in catch-up mode to secure another sponsor in time for the coming season.
Irony sure is ironic, isn’t it? The man who pioneered long-term sponsorship with the STP brand is seeing the effects of modern-day NASCAR in a way that hurts. Cheerios and General Mills were long-term sponsors themselves, having stuck with the Pettys for the past nine seasons.
Everybody knows that NASCAR is an economic boom town, and when the string is played out in one place, Sponsor A takes its millions and moves on to the next stop. It’s happened with such long-time sponsors as Tide, Folgers, Coors and so on.
The Pettys are a little different from some of the other Cup teams in that this is what they do for a living. Always have, always will, so sayeth the King. It’s not a question of tuning down the team until a sponsor is found. It’s a question of putting bread on the table, so to speak.
The team moved from its ancestral lands in Level Cross to Mooresville this past winter in an effort to make up a step or two on the other competitors in the paddock.
“We had our best year in 1967, and we had eight people,” Petty said recently. “These were the engine people, the guys who built the cars, drove them to the track, pitted it — it was just a small nucleus of people who did everything. They did the engineering, building, painting, pitting, built the engines, put them in and took them out. Over a period of time, the technical deal started coming in. We weren’t technical, so we had to go get technical people to come in because the guy next door has technical people. If I hire one and he hires two, then I have to come back and hire three…so we were in competition with them.”
As the pendulum swung away from the Pettys, it became tougher and tougher to get that done.
“It changes around,” he said. “I’m big on football and stuff, and if you look back, everybody tried to keep up with Green Bay, and the first thing you know, Green Bay got left by the wayside. Now Green Bay is getting their stuff back together, and they’re among the leaders now.
“When we started, my dad was right at the top of the heap and then come along with me all these years and we stayed close to the top, and then we went off the hill and down in the valley. Now we’re trying to get back on the hill, like the Yankees did and Green Bay.”
Now, as he and his team have made the first step up out of the valley and back onto the hill, the grade just got a lot steeper.
“No matter what you do, it’s what other people do also,” Petty said of catching up to the pack. “If they stay still for a year or two and not continue to go, it wouldn’t take you long to catch up with that. But you catch up one step and that guy’s gone a half-step forward, so you’ve got a lot farther to go than he has and it takes a lot longer to get there because it took him a long time to get there, whoever it might be, Hendrick or Roush or whoever. They didn’t come in and blow everyone away either. It took them years and years and years and a lot of money and people to put them in the position they’re in. If we go forward, we’ve got to start climbing that hill. Every step they take, we have to take two, especially if we’re trying to get ahead of them, which is what we’re trying to do.”
They might just get back even yet, but they’ll do so after overcoming the loss of a primary sponsor and all the stuff one helps a race team buy.
Say it isn’t so.