How things are quite different for one Cup team a year later

A year ago, the weekly watch was starting on if Richard Petty Motorsports would make it to the race track. Financial issues were burying the team, bills were due and money was short. It got to the point where each week the question was as much if rather than when the RPM trucks would leave the shop for the next race.

A year later, Richard Petty, Andrew Murstein and Doug Bergeron have come together to revive the organization. AJ Allmendinger heads into Sunday’s race at Talladega 14th in the points, which puts him on pace for a career-best finish in the points. Marcos Ambrose, who joined the team after last season is 18th in the points heading into this weekend and that ties his best finish in the points, which came in 2009. Ambrose also won the Watkins Glen race this year.

What a difference a year makes.

“I think the turning point was at Charlotte last October when we found out that we might have trouble finishing the season and Richard Petty stepped up himself and said he was going to make a commitment to finish the year and worked with his partners at the time to get to the end of the year,’’ said Robbie Loomis, chief operating officer at RPM.

“That worked out and from that point it gave Andy and Doug something to be able to come in to. I think that was the real turning point, and I remember at Charlotte when we talked about the possibility of maybe not finishing the year out. Richard said then that, ‘This has been my life, my whole life and this is what we are going to do. We are going to finish it and start working on next year.’ Then he said, ‘We have to finish this year so we have something going into next year.’”

Allmendinger recalls that time last year with the uncertainty if RPM’s cars would get to the next race, let alone if the team would survive for this season.

“It was a tough time and it was right about this time when everybody started feeling the pressure and hearing things about what was going on.  I thought we had a good thing going and I didn’t want my guys to leave.  All of these guys in here have a lot more at stake in a certain way.  They have families and they work so hard.  They’re gone from their families a lot and the way this sport is right now it’s a tough time and I didn’t want them without jobs more than anything.

“Most of the credit goes to them because they could have easily just packed it in and said, ‘screw it,’ but they showed up to the race track and they jumped through hoops to get the race cars ready when they weren’t allowed in our own shop and out in parking lots of race tracks, so most of the credit went to them.  They showed up.  They’re racers.  They knew all they could do was show up and try to run as good as possible and we did a good job.  We were really fast every weekend and, at that point, luckily it worked out.”

As the team looks toward the end of this year, there focus is more on the track this time.

“We have big tasks ahead of us,’’ Loomis said. “We have struggled a lot at flatter, mile-and-a-half, lower grip race tracks. We tend to run great at Atlanta and some other places but the flatter they get and lower the grip level the more we struggle to get the right parts and pieces and feel for the driver so that he can have confidence and capitalize on it from there.

“We will continue to work on that for sure. I think looking ahead that we are looking forward to Martinsville, which has been a great track for AJ. Marcos was a top-five car at Texas. Last year at Homestead we finished fourth and fifth down there, so we have a lot of great race tracks coming up. We just need to finish up strong because it is that momentum you end the season with a lot of times that carries you into the next year.”

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