Petty team slowly making progress

Slowly and quietly, Petty Enterprises is doing what it takes to get competitive again.

After years of struggle, the once-mighty NASCAR team founded by Lee Petty and carried on by his son Richard and, now, his grandson Kyle, is showing signs that all the work is beginning to pay off.

The results so far this season aren’t all that great. Kyle’s best finish in three starts is 22nd at Fontana, and Bobby Labonte’s best showing was last Sunday at Las Vegas, where he finished 13th.

But Kyle Petty is excited by what he is seeing on both teams.

“We haven’t quite got the finishes that we are looking for, but we are putting ourselves in much better positions late in the race,” Petty said. “That is one of our main objectives every time we go to the track. We just want our Dodges to be there at the end and, if that happens, we feel we can fight it out with the best of them.”

The team is hoping that today’s visit to Atlanta Motor Speedway will take everything up a notch.

A year ago, with 2000 Cup champion Labonte in his first season with the Petty team, he led 13 laps early in the Atlanta race before his engine blew and relegated him to 43rd. Petty ran well, too, getting to the end and finishing a season-high eighth on the 1.5-mile superspeedway oval.

“We feel confident that we’ll have a good car,” said Labonte, who has six victories at Atlanta, including five since the track was reconfigured in 1997. “We have done a lot of work over the winter months to continue to improve.

“This weekend is a good barometer of upcoming races because we have so many races on tracks that are similar to Atlanta. Everyone wants to see good results this weekend.”

Labonte, whose last Cup win came while driving for Joe Gibbs Racing in the 2003 season finale at Homestead, knows there is a lot more work to do.

“We want to win every week,” he said. “More importantly, though, we want to continue to improve. We’re right in the middle now in points [21st]. They are important. Right now, you can get shuffled back in a hurry or you can jump up some, too.

“That’s not going to be the case in a few more weeks. It’s going to start to get tight really soon.”

A couple of seasons ago, it would have seemed inconceivable for a Petty car to have a shot at making the Chase for the Nextel Cup championship. But Labonte said he believes his No. 43 team has a shot at it.

“The top 12 positions in points, everyone is looking at those spots, and everyone wants to get there,” he said. “We have expectations to be there. Performance each week is important. Atlanta is a great chance for us to make more strides to the front.”

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Sterling Marlin must be starting to feel like the guy in the Li’l Abner comics who walked around all day with a rain cloud over his head.

Since an 11th-place finish at Lowe’s Motor Speedway last October, Marlin’s Ginn Racing No. 14 Chevrolet has found nothing but bad luck on the racetrack.

It’s been a succession of things, including blown engines, getting caught up in other people’s crashes and some just plain strange occurrences that have led to no finish better than 17th in his last eight Cup starts.

It all began the week after Lowe’s at Martinsville, where, with fewer than 20 laps to go, NASCAR informed Marlin’s team that something was hanging from the back of the car. They ordered Marlin to pit and have the thing removed.

When Marlin arrived in the pits, nothing was found. He wound up 21st.

And the bad luck didn’t end with the start of a new season.

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Dale Earnhardt Jr. insists he never really was worried despite getting off to a bad start this season with finishes of 32nd and 40th.

“We used up two mulligans early, but nobody wearing a red Bud uniform was too worried because we had run pretty well before we had trouble,” Earnhardt explained. “It’s one thing if you blow up or crash while you’re racing for 30th place, but it’s another when you have a good car and run in the top five before you have issues.

“No one panicked after those first two races. The media made a much bigger deal out of it than it really was.”

Even with some late-race problems last Sunday, Earnhardt finished 11th and jumped from 42nd to 28th in the season points. Heading to Atlanta, he’s full of confidence.

“We’ve had three top fives in a row at Atlanta and it would be great to get a fourth so we can keep moving up in the points,” he said. “We’re pretty pleased to be back in the top 30, and we can move a lot higher at Atlanta.”