By John Brice
of The Daily Times Staff

Richard Petty takes a moment to sign photo’s for the employees at Skier’s Choice.

The King” isn’t going anywhere in NASCAR’s history books anytime soon. Richard Petty, with

more than 200 career victories, has no serious challengers in a sport that has seen its popularity surge and winning more widely distributed in recent years.

Again in Maryville on Tuesday for the second time in 18 months to tour the Skier’s Choice boat manufacturing plant and mingle with fans, Petty, who in his most recent TV commercial slides into a gas station, slowed down to chat with The Daily Times.

Wearing his iconic feathered cowboy hat and asphalt-black sunglasses, Petty took time to discuss his staying power in the sport; relocating his racing headquarters; the sport’s Car of Tomorrow and other topics.

John Brice: You had another long line of people here to meet you and get an autograph. Last year when you visited Skier’s Choice, you signed a tailgate still on a truck. This time you signed a piece of a dashboard. How do you explain your lasting popularity?

Richard Petty: It makes you feel good to see these people come in that are bringing some older stuff in, and they’re young kids. Or to me they are young kids and their mother and daddy collected it all and sort of passed it down from one generation to another. So a lot of the guys who are racing now don’t have the backing of the older people because the older people have picked Richard Petty or David Pearson and that’s where a lot of times the younger people still have that history.

Anybody that knows anything about racing, if they see me, they see history. So I guess maybe that’s why.

JB: Along historical lines, you recently announced that you would move your racing headquarters from Level Cross, N.C., closer to Charlotte after 60 years there. How tough was that decision and what are the benefits?

RP: It’s been a decision we’ve been trying to put off for the last 10 years. Finally, we just said ‘OK, let’s bite the bullet. We’re going to have to do it.’ So we’re going to give it a try. We’re not selling our business at home; we can always come back home. It’s just a matter of we think that the growth of NASCAR and the new engineering and different machinery and we don’t have it. In Mooresville, we’ll be able to be closer to all that stuff. We feel like that’s going to be a big plus for us.

JB: Was it a necessity to make the move in order to be competitive?

RP: If you had an unlimited budget, then you could go anywhere. But we don’t have an unlimited budget. If you had an unlimited budget, you could buy all the equipment they’ve got and have it somewhere else. But we don’t have that so we’ve got to supplement in between. The closer we can get to that, then we can still get in and rent time from other people instead of owning our own stuff. We’re going to be closer to that stuff, and that’s going to save us time.

JB: You just recently hired a new crew chief, Jeff Meendering, for Bobby Labonte in the No. 43 car. Talk about the decision to make a switch there and what you hope he’ll bring to the team.

RP: We’ve been working on that for probably six months. Knowing that we were going to need someone for ’08, and Robbie Loomis had worked with Jeff and he’d never been a crew chief but had been a car chief and felt like he had the experience of 10 or 12 years and would be able to move up. Robbie felt like to start off if they could help each other out and help him to get it going, and I think Jeff is looking forward to it and Bobby is really looking forward to having a new crew chief and just starting out a new year. We changed crew chiefs in the middle of the year, and everything is kind of confusing when you do that. They’re going to test next week at Atlanta, and they’re going to go test at California and Las Vegas and Daytona. They’ll have four tests under their belt by the time they get there to start racing, and they’ll be able to learn each other. That should be a plus-plus on that one.

JB: What were your impressions this season of the Car of Tomorrow?

RP: I like it. You’ve been running the same thing for 20 years, I like to see stuff new. The safety features are what got it started. The cars don’t drive as good, handle as good as other cars, but what have they got drivers for? I told them if the dang things were perfect, I’d still be driving. That’s where the driver comes in, to make up the difference when the things don’t work or don’t run good or handle good.

JB: So you think it’s better because it will more clearly reveal the better drivers?

RP: The Car of Tomorrow races we had this year were great. People could race each other and run side-by-side. You can’t do that with the cars we’ve been running because they cut out 50 percent of the aero downforce. So that means it’s more mechanical, and when it’s more mechanical, it takes more driving to keep it going. The other was like an airplane wing and you just aimed it. Well, it wasn’t quite that easy but it was according to what they’ve got now.

JB: What were your impressions of Dale Earnhardt Jr. signing with Hendrick Motorsports? Do you think the new “Super teams” of drivers will negatively impact the sport?

RP: It’s just like everything else. To stay competitive, you’re going to have to make changes and stay current. That’s the same reason we’re moving (headquarters). We’re trying to stay current. You’ve got a lot of investors coming in now (to help fund teams). You’ve got teams joining up together. Instead of having 43 individual teams, you’re going to have about 15 teams with three or four drivers apiece. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s football, baseball, or whatever. They do the same thing. They don’t have 50 or 60 teams out there. They’ve just got their 30 teams.

JB: Jimmie Johnson won the Nextel Cup with four consecutive wins to finish the season. How impressed were you by his season?

RP: He was just very, very lucky. He’s good, but circumstances beyond his control won him a couple of those races. That’s life. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Nobody is just big above anybody else. It’s circumstances as to whether you have a good year or bad year, good race or bad race. You’ve got a lot of people talent-wise that are pretty much the same if they can just get on a roll. I’ve been there on both ends of it. Got on a roll where I couldn’t do anything, and got on a roll where I couldn’t do anything wrong either. I didn’t change from week-to-week or year-to-year. I still had the same people working on the car. The same driver. And all of the sudden, you looked like a good driver or a bad driver. That’s life.