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[h=2]The return of the King[/h] Monday, 03 April 2017


Kelly Crandall / Images by LAT

In an ever-evolving sport, the pursuit of perfection never stops. But in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, where inches and tenths of a second can go a long way, teams who find themselves behind have a far tougher battle.


Richard Petty Motorsports has been digging down deep for over a year to win that fight. But the good news according to team owner Richard Petty and driver Aric Almirola is that results are starting to show.

"We know there's been progress," Petty told RACER. "We look down at our lap speeds that we ran during the race, how we make pit stops, all that kind of stuff. It's all coming together."

Almirola has been with the Petty organization since 2010, scoring a win and a playoff berth in 2014 with a victory in the July race at Daytona. But whatever the company found that year didn't last long, and the group has been searching for performance answers ever since.

In 2016, Almirola earned just one top-10 finish and no top fives. Then teammate Brian Scott also scored just a lone top 10, a second-place at Talladega Superspeedway in the fall. Through the first five races of 2017, Almirola has already crossed both a top five and top 10 finish off the list with a fourth-place effort in the season-opening Daytona 500.

Saturday afternoon, Almirola was 10th fastest in final practice at Martinsville Speedway. He finished 18th for his fourth consecutive top-20 finish.

"I feel like we've closed the gap, but we still have a long way to go," Almirola told RACER. "We all recognize that. That's the one good thing that I've seen really about the offseason and these first few weeks into the year is that everybody at Richard Petty Motorsports recognizes we're not where we want to be and we're all kind of holding hands in this together knowing we have be better on every front.

"From aero, to chassis, to engineering, to our pit stops, to everything. Everything's got to be better, and it takes absolutely perfection to run with the guys up front. That's really what we've been focusing on, elevating every aspect of our entire program."



Crawl before you walk. Walk before you run. Or in laymen's terms of racing, build consistency in your program before thinking about winning. Consistency was a big point of contention for Petty.

"We're working our way up toward the front," said Petty. "If we can continue to run 15th, we can work on being 10th. We continue to run 10th, we can work on fifth. But we can't go from 15th to first."

The seven-time champion knows his organization is not currently at the point where it can win races unless it were to luck into one.

"I think some of the engineering stuff in the sport, in general, it went a little faster than we were able to keep up," Almirola added. "We took on a really big task for our race team with trying to build our own chassis, and that put us behind, to be honest with you. We focused a lot of attention on that program, and we put a lot of engineering resources into that program and to be just really frank, it didn't work out. We focused too much energy on that and forgot all the other things that help make the race car go fast. We've gotten back getting chassis from Roush, and now we can take our small engineering group, especially compared to the field, and we can focus their attention on things that make the race car go fast when we get to the racetrack."

No more designing parts and pieces for front clips or something related to the chassis.

"Overall, I think the big key area is just speed in the race car, and that comes from aerodynamic and lighter cars and better handling cars," Almirola said. "Getting a better race vehicle because Drew [Blickensderfer, crew chief] has proven he can work on a race car and make it go fast; our engineers, all the guys on this team have been on successful race cars that have run up front. We've shown we can run up front. We have to have a race car that allows us to go do that, and that's been the challenge."

During the offseason, the organization made the decision to downsize to one car after Scott retired instead of fielding a second car for the sake of having a two on the grid. While it's also resulted in the reduction of manpower, all hands and resources are being pushed onto Almirola's team. Not having a teammate is a double-edged sword, Almirola says.

"Our focus is not going in several different areas and different directions in the shop, because you'd have one driver that wants one thing, a crew chief that wants something, another driver and crew chief that want something else," Almirola said. "The focus is very streamlined right now, and I think that's a very big positive."

But more work remains to cut down on those pressure inches and tenths.

"It's a tenth here, a tenth there, a tenth over there," Petty said. "It's not that (Almirola) isn't driving the car right, or the team isn't setting it up right, not got the right air pressure, tire combination, whatever it may be.

"It's all things that we're not finishing up. We're doing 99.9 percent; we're just not doing that extra deal."