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Tag: Lynda Petty

  • Aric Almirola Destined For Richmond Victory; Richard Petty Returns to Racetrack

    Aric Almirola Destined For Richmond Victory; Richard Petty Returns to Racetrack

    Aric Almirola and Trent Owens are determined and destined to win at Richmond International Raceway (RIR) this weekend; especially after it was announced that Richard Petty, team owner of Richard Petty Motorsports, will be returning to the racetrack for the first time since the tragic and unforeseen passing of his wife, Lynda Petty.

    “It’s going to be great to have our leader back at the race track,” Almirola expressed on Wednesday. “He is the name and the face of our company, and all the guys on the race team and myself included look up to him and enjoy having him around at the race track and having him inside hauler and talking to us after practice and getting his perspective on what he sees with other race cars and with our race cars throughout practice.”

    Almirola attended an appearance with Petty in Nashville, Tennessee on Tuesday and he found ‘The Kings’ attitude to be repaired and prepared for Richmond this weekend.

    “I know (Petty is) itching to get back,” Almirola further explained. “You can’t take the racer out of that guy. He’s not going to sit at home and just sit around and do nothing.”

    Owens, who is the nephew of Petty, also is confident that Petty returning will allow everyone at the organization to take a deep breath and refocus on the task at hand, winning.

    “I think it will be good medicine,” Owens said Wednesday. “When something like that happens, you kind of want to hide for a little bit and just get your feelings straight. But he’s been by the shop and been in good spirits, and I think he’s doing very well considering.”

    “We look forward to definitely getting him back to the race track and getting him back into race mode.”

    Now, with the relief of having the boss back, Almirola and crew chief Owens turn their undivided attention to Richmond, where they’ll hope to deliver their first victory of the season, which would undoubtedly be an emotional one – for multiple reasons

    “I always get excited about going to Richmond,” Almirola commented during a press conference held on Wednesday morning. “I like the racetrack a lot, and then besides the racetrack, it’s a big weekend for us with Smithfield Foods headquarters being right there nearby in Richmond, and we get a lot of people come out from Smithfield headquarters, and it’s just a big weekend, and it’s a lot of fun.”

    “The racetrack is where I made my first (NASCAR) Nationwide (Series) start, and I just got a lot of good memories from there, and I’ve always run well it seems like, so I’m excited about going to Richmond this weekend.”

    Almirola, 30, finished eighth last season at Richmond after starting a dismal 34th position- his first top-10 at the difficult speedway.

    “I think I have a really good understanding of what it takes to run good at Richmond, and I’ve had good runs there,” Almirola expressed about his wisdom within Richmond. “You know, last spring we ran pretty good there.  I think we finished in the top 5 or maybe top 10, I’m not sure, and then in the fall race I thought we had an even better car than we had in the spring race, and we had an incident on pit road on a green flag stop that ended up getting a couple laps down and hurt our day.”

    He’s completed in five Nationwide Series races at Richmond finishing a track-best seventh during the 2011 season with JR Motorsports. This weekend, he’s hoping to utilize that running his previous experience at RIR to help drive him into victory lane.

    “Richmond is a place that I actually have a lot of laps at,” Almirola further commented. “The very first time I ever got to drive a truck, it was a two-day test at Richmond back in 2004 and I’ve done a lot of testing there in trucks and Nationwide cars and even Cup cars back when we were allowed to go test, and I made my first Nationwide start there.  I think I’ve run quite a few Nationwide races there, and I’ve made quite a few Cup starts there.”

    Owens, who joined his Uncle Petty’s operation at the beginning of this season, is also expecting a good placing this weekend, despite the demands being a crew chief calls upon throughout the course of this weekend.

    “Really looking forward to (the) race (at Richmond),” Owens commented during the press conference. “Our short track program seems to be in a decent direction this year.  We’ve got some work to do on our mile-and-a-halfs, but really looking forward to getting in front of the Smithfield folks and putting on a good show.”

    “Practice is so tough here, the tires wear out at Richmond but that does provide for good racing.  You really want to be good off the hauler and just kind of work on a few things, maybe mock up some practice changes that duplicate your race stuff.  But practicing during the day, racing at night at a place like Richmond is just so much different.”

    Almirola and Owens are hoping for success in just their ninth race together, however, they also both understand the ultimate achievement isn’t to win, but it’s to help re-boost Petty’s confidence and moral, even in the toughest of moments.

  • Surprising and Not Surprising: Martinsville STP 500

    Surprising and Not Surprising: Martinsville STP 500

    With no practice due to a rainy weekend, the Cup drivers unleashed their pent up aggression on the short track of Martinsville. Here is what was surprising and not surprising from the 65th running of the STP 500.

    Surprising:  The closest that Hendrick Motorsports got to Victory Lane at Martinsville was the motor and chassis as Kurt Busch surprisingly took his No. 41 Haas Automation Chevrolet to the checkered flag.

    The win also marked significant milestones for driver and crew chief as this was Busch’s 25th Cup win and his crew chief Daniel Knost’s first win as a crew chief.

    Busch’s 83 start winless drought finally came to a close, with his last victory prior to this at the Monster Mile in the fall race of 2011.

    “Every time you come to Martinsville you draw a line through it; like there’s no way I’ll be able to challenge those Hendrick guys,” Busch said. “The Stewart-Haas team gave me a team to do it.”

    “It’s an unbelievable feeling to deliver.”

    Not Surprising:  While Brad Keselowski had some harsh words to say about the race winner, sarcastically ‘thanking Kurt’ after tangling with him early in the race and finishing 38th, he kept his sense of humor when he took to Twitter after the race.

    “I’m here,” Keselowski tweeted when a follower said that he would probably not be on social media for a while. “Laughing at all the hate tweets. #freeEntertainment.”

    With that difficult finish, the driver of the No. 2 Miller Lite Ford dropped three spots to seventh in the point standings.

    Surprising:  Dale Earnhardt Jr. was surprisingly disappointed with not getting a clock, even though he finished third in his No. 88 Diet Mountain Dew Chevrolet and took the points lead away from Carl Edwards.

    “Well, it was up and down,” Junior said of his race. “We ran out of tire there just trying to get by those lap guys that were giving me the top in the corner and I don’t need to be up there running.”

    “That cost us a little bit.”

    Junior and girlfriend Amy Reimann did, however, console themselves with a Martinsville hot dog as his “reward” for finishing third, tweeting a picture of the celebration from the plane.

    This was Earnhardt Jr.’s 16th top-10 finish in 29 races at the track known as the ‘Paper Clip.’

    Not Surprising:  Martinsville made for some interesting milestones, including another new winner for the season and a record number of lead changes.

    Kurt Busch became the sixth different winner in six races to date and there were a record 33 lead changes among 12 drivers, the most ever at Martinsville. The previous record for lead changes was 31, set in April of 2011.

    Surprising:  They may have been driving with heavy hearts due to the death of Miss Lynda Petty, the King’s late wife, but the two Richard Petty Motorsports drivers pulled off great finishes, with Marcos Ambrose in fifth and Aric Almirola in eighth.

    In fact, this was only the fourth time that the two RPM teammates have finished in the top-10 together, but the second time in six races this season.

    ““We’ve had a really tough week. We lost Miss Lynda.” Ambrose, driver of the No. 9 DeWalt Ford said. “We really wanted to win for them bad out there, but we’ll take a top five.”

    “I’m really proud of all the guys at Richard Petty Motorsports,” Almirola, driver of the No. 43 STP Ford, said. “If we keep running like this, we’ll get to Victory Lane.”

    Not Surprising:  The highest finishing Ford was Joey Logano, who deemed his drive in the No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford “a battle.”

    “This race is really hard, but we finished where we deserved to finish,” Logano said after finishing fourth. “That’s where we ran and that’s about all we had.”

    “I wish we had a little more.”

    Surprising:  “That’s all I had,” are words that are eerily similar to Logano’s but are not typically heard from six-time champion Jimmie Johnson. But that was his summary of the race as well at one of his strongest tracks.

    “I’d been loose in the final third of the race and was hanging on there,” Johnson, who finished runner up in his No. 48 Lowe’s Chevrolet, said. “When (Kurt Busch) got back by me, I was hopefully that he’d wear his stuff out and I could get back by him. He did but I couldn’t hold him off.”

    “I started to get looser and looser,” Johnson continued. “I ran the rear tires off the car.”

    “That’s all I had.”

    This was Johnson’s 22nd top-10 finish in 25 races at Martinsville Speedway and his fourth top-10 finish in the 2014 season.

    Not Surprising:   While most drivers are focused on the wins, Jamie McMurray was thinking about points and shaking his head.

    McMurray, behind the wheel of the No. 1 McDonald’s Chevrolet, was involved in an on-track incident with Dale Earnhardt Jr. on Lap 199 that caused him to finish 42nd and falling eleven spots in the point standings to 23rd.

    “I thought the No. 88 would be a little more patient with me. I had gotten by him in lap traffic. Then he got on my inside. When he got into me it was like it couldn’t get off and spun me around and just got into the wall there,” Jamie Mac said. “Really unfortunate had a good car, every race we’ve had good cars.”

    “You just wish you weren’t racing for points because that is the hardest part to swallow is the point’s loss,” McMurray continued. “It’s fun to run well but that is what you will think about for the next five days.”

    Surprising:  After missing the previous race week due to metal in his eye and after vowing to make a comeback and win at a track where he has the third-best driver rating, it was most surprising to see Denny Hamlin finish a disappointing 19th.

    The driver of the No. 11 FedEx Freight Toyota had ignition issues and then was just plain slow during the race.

    “Just a frustrating day, especially when you know that this is a race track that I feel like I can make up a difference here and there,” Hamlin said. “We were a football field and then some away from the right set up today.”

    Not Surprising:  Austin Dillon, behind the wheel of the No. 3 Dow Chevrolet was the highest finishing rookie, finishing 15th at the very demanding short track.

    “I had some good runs there in my truck but it was totally different in a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series car,” Dillon said. “It’s one of those races where you have to fight to stay in it.”

    “Things were definitely wild there.”

    The Cup Series will move from the short track of Martinsville to the track in Texas where everything is big for the Duck Commander 500.

     

  • Hot 20 – As Jeff Gordon experiences an interesting week, we remember Lynda Petty

    Hot 20 – As Jeff Gordon experiences an interesting week, we remember Lynda Petty

    I guess Jeff Gordon had reason to be somewhat hot this past week. Last Sunday, he came within a Clint Bowyer spin of taking the prize in California. Then, a satirical website came out with a story of Gordon coming out, admitting to dating an openly gay fellow, and “reporting” on the outrage of some fans at the “news.” I guess this comes with being the second prettiest driver in NASCAR, though the fact he has two kids with one of the prettiest spouses in NASCAR should be a hint that happy he may be, gay he is not.

    One thing Gordon is, and that is the best driver in Cup who thus far has yet to register a win this season. Matt Kenseth and Jimmie Johnson are in the ball park. Even though Kevin Harvick may have won at Phoenix he finds his stock plunging. Three races he has looked good, at least the first few chapters, then someone rips out the final few pages to leave him with finishes of 41st, 39th, and 36th. While the official standings might have him sitting fifth, last among those with a victory to their credit, he is nowhere to be found in anybody’s Top 20 finishers when it comes to accumulated points.

    Every method of determining a champion has its critics. While we await reaction to this year’s elimination rounds, most remember that Matt Kenseth won the title in 2003 but fewer remember that Ryan Newman won eight races that year. The points system in place did not really reward him for the effort.  Still, that in no way diminishes Kenseth’s crown or the six Johnson has claimed since the Chase was instituted. It may alter who we think of as being the best over any one campaign, but in the long run the cream always rises to the top.

    Richard Petty may have become the King due to his seven championships and 200 victories, but this week we mourn the loss of his queen.  Lynda and Richard were married in 1959, and it probably is not a coincidence that it was the next year her husband  began to win his first races. While Richard ruled the tracks, it was Lynda who ruled the roost. She was even the family disciplinarian. On that subject, a few years ago she said that you could ask her son “‘Did your daddy ever whip you?’ and he’d say, ‘No, but my mother wailed the daylights out of me.’ ”   She had her causes that she was passionate about, but none were as important to her than her family.  We join with the entire NASCAR family in remembering Lynda Petty.

    If we returned to former days when there was no Chase, if we used today’s points system but winners were rewarded with 69 to 70 points, and we determined our champion over 36 races, this is how our Hot 20 standings would look like as the action heads to Martinsville for this Sunday.

     

     

    Driver

    Races

    Win

    Points

    1

      Carl Edwards

    5

    1

    208

    2

      Dale Earnhardt, Jr.

    5

    1

    207

    3

      Brad Keselowski

    5

    1

    204

    4

      Jeff Gordon

    5

    0

    184

    5

      Kyle Busch

    5

    1

    180

    6

      Matt Kenseth

    5

    0

    179

    7

      Jimmie Johnson

    5

    0

    165

    8

      Ryan Newman

    5

    0

    150

    9

      Austin Dillon

    5

    0

    150

    10

      Joey Logano

    5

    0

    146

    11

      Denny Hamlin

    4

    0

    140

    12

      Jamie McMurray

    5

    0

    138

    13

      Brian Vickers

    5

    0

    137

    14

      Paul Menard

    5

    0

    134

    15

      Ricky Stenhouse, Jr.

    5

    0

    132

    16

      Kyle Larson

    5

    0

    131

    17

      Tony Stewart

    5

    0

    127

    18

      Casey Mears

    5

    0

    126

    19

      Kasey Kahne

    5

    0

    123

    20

      Greg Biffle

    5

    0

    122

    21

      Marcos Ambrose

    5

    0

    122