Richard Petty’s name survives team merger

CONCORD, N.C. -- Richard Petty's race team has been absorbed in a merger, but Petty's name and the car number he made famous are still around.

The new team created by the merger of Petty Enterprises with Gillett Evernham Motorsports has been renamed Richard Petty Motorsports (RPM), capitalizing on the seven-time champion's marketability.

Sources had said the Petty name would not disappear, and the official announcement was made today during the first day of the annual NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Lowe's Motor Speedway.

Petty, stock car racing's king and at 71 still one of the most recognizable faces in sports, will have a presence with the new team, he said today. The team will be run out of the GEM shop.

Reed Sorenson will drive a Dodge with Petty's famed No. 43 for RPM this season. Another Dodge with Petty's No. 44 will be run by GEM's newest driver, A.J. Allmendinger, in at least the first five races of the season as the team attempts to find more sponsorship.

Those two drivers join GEM holdovers Kasey Kahne and Elliott Sadler, who both have full-time rides.

According to a report on ESPN.com, when the deal was hammered out this month, Petty insisted that the merged team include jobs for Petty's longtime crew chief Dale Inman, public relations representative Brian Moffitt and vice president of race operations Robbie Loomis.

Also, according to ESPN, Petty insisted that the 43 and 44 cars would not carry a logo for Budweiser, one of the GEM sponsors, in keeping with the Petty tradition of not being associated with alcoholic-beverage sponsors.

Absent from the merger agreement is a role for Petty's son, Kyle Petty, who last year split time between driving and other activities, including on-camera television work. Richard Petty said his son may drive a few races for the team.

The Pettys first sold controlling interest in the 60-year-old Petty Enterprises team to the financial company Boston Ventures last summer before working out the merger with GEM owner George Gillett.

That's just one result of the escalating costs of racing combined with a severe shortage of sponsorship money and the ongoing troubles of Detroit's General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, along with Toyota -- the four manufacturers racing in NASCAR.

Besides Petty, NASCAR's only other seven-time cup champion was the late Dale Earnhardt. The team he founded, Dale Earnhardt Inc., has merged with Chip Ganassi Racing.

Bill Davis, whose team ran two cars in Cup and also won the truck championship last season, has sold his team.

Other teams, including Richard Childress Racing and Roush Fenway Racing, have had to find partners with ready cash to remain competitive.

The Wood Brothers team, one of the most successful in NASCAR Cup history, has chopped its 2009 racing schedule to only 12 of the circuit's 36 events.

Meanwhile, teams in both the secondand third-tier series -- Nationwide and Camping World Trucks -- have found it increasingly difficult to find sponsorship.

"There have definitely been a lot of major changes," said Loomis, who will be director of racing for RPM. "I think this winter has probably been exhausting for everybody, just trying to keep up with the changes. You have to keep up with the changes minute by minute rather than day by day."

Foster Gillett, son of GEM's owner, said the name change for the team "comes with no sadness from my family. It comes with a great deal of burden of expectation. We look forward to trying to live up to this great legacy."

He insisted that putting Petty's name on the team was not just an attempt to use the racing icon to attract sponsorship.

"It's much more about a partnership with Richard himself and having him help us," Gillet said. "We're new in this sport. We're new owners and we have a tremendous amount to learn, and Richard's probably the best to learn from."