Three NASCAR teams have history on their side, but will they end up being history?

Consider this: There are NASCAR fans who never have seen Petty Enterprises or the Wood Brothers win a race.

As NASCAR embraces its past – trying to reconnect with older fans and educate younger ones – some of the sport’s most storied teams face critical issues that could determine if they survive or become a part of history.

Petty Enterprises, the Wood Brothers and Yates Racing lack resources and finances to compete against the top teams, which has led to a lack of success.

The Pettys last won a Cup series race in 1999. The Wood Brothers’ last victory came two months after Dale Earnhardt’s death in 2001. Yates Racing, which won a series title in 1999, hasn’t had a driver finish in the top 20 in points the past two seasons.

Rarely do plummeting teams survive. Morgan-McClure Motorsports, which won three Daytona 500s in the 1990s, isn’t racing because it lost its sponsor as its results worsened and never recovered. While co-owner Jerry McClure says he hopes the Abingdon, Va.-based team will return later this season, it falls further behind each week it doesn’t compete.

Even as Petty Enterprises competes, it faces several problems. The team is in talks with an investor. It needs sponsors for both cars because General Mills will go elsewhere after this season. Bobby Labonte’s contract expires after this season, and he hasn’t said if he’ll return. Kyle Petty has struggled recently, and his future could be cloudy. His car has failed to make the past three races, including tonight’s event at Phoenix.

“We’re just in a difficult situation because you’re at a place in a sport that is changing,’’ Kyle Petty said last weekend at Texas Motor Speedway. “You’re trying to stay a part of the sport, trying to catch up to the sport.”

The Wood Brothers also face many questions. The team missed four of the first eight races this season, including the Daytona 500 for the first time since 1962. It only made the race tonight because of a champion’s provisional to Bill Elliott, who is scheduled to drive in only part of the races this season.

The Wood Brothers, which has one top-10 finish in its past 72 starts, has gone through a series of changes in recent years. The team moved from Stuart, Va., to Mooresville, N.C., and then to a race shop in Harrisburg, N.C. It was aligned with car owner Jack Roush’s teams, then split, merged with a Busch series team and still has not found the right ingredient to improve performance.

Yates Racing also faces an uncertain future. The revamped team that once was Robert Yates Racing, has no full-time primary sponsor for either of its two cars, creating questions about the team’s health.

Roush Fenway Racing provides Yates with chassis and help finding sponsors, among other things. Geoff Smith, president of Roush Fenway Racing, says his team needs the Yates organization to be successful.

“One reason that we started the thought process of bolstering up other Ford teams was because we recognize there probably needed to be a mass of Ford teams that was just larger than us,” Smith said, noting Roush will have to downsize to meet NASCAR’s four-team limit. “Last year, you had our five and two Yates and one Wood Brothers for eight teams, but three of those teams are in this downward cycle in terms of performance.”

The bigger issue is how much the sport needs some of these famous teams, which provide a link to the past, to be successful.

“I think the more history you have involved makes it better,” said Leonard Wood, one of the founders of the Wood Brothers. “Gives you something to talk about.”

Now, the talk is what has happened to these teams and whether they can recover.