“We now have the greatest driver of all time and champion crew chiefs partnered with the business prowess of the Gillett family. We have a rock solid foundation for the future.” Those were the words of Richard Petty Motorsports CEO Tom Reddin after announcing Gillett Evernham Motorsports’ merger with Petty Enterprises early in 2009.

As things appear ten weeks into the season, that solid foundation is quickly beginning to crumble. With four drivers outside the top-15 in the series standing and cars that simply do not perform on a weekly basis, Richard Petty Motorsports is a team in desperate need of fixing.

When George Gillett Jr. bought into Evernham Motorsports in 2007, the “international businessman” (according to his bio on the team’s website) set out to make his newest acquisition a successful business, in addition to a successful race team.

Working with co-owner Ray Evernham, Gillett was determined to focus his efforts to the business end of the deal to allow Evernham to focus on the competition side of things. Unfortunately, that effort never turned into the success either Gillett or Evernham had hoped for, despite having one of the sport’s biggest stars – Kasey Kahne – in their stable of drivers.

As a result, Gillett Evernham Motorsports brought in Tom Reddin in 2008 to serve as the team’s CEO to further develop the business end of the company.

“NASCAR is changing,” Reddin pointed out when he came on board. “These race teams now are top flight businesses that have to be as good off the track in the business community as they are on the track. I have grown and built businesses my entire career. To succeed in this sport in the coming years, you are going to have to have a business plan that provides a major win for your business partners, your drivers, and your employees. Success will center on people, process and technology. You have to excel in all three dimensions.”

Entering the highly competitive world of NASCAR, Reddin had very little experience when it came to racing. The former CEO of Lending Tree, Reddin’s extent of racing knowledge included Sports Club Cars of America (SCCA) races, a Skip Barber series and a BMW Club Racing series – hardly the stuff of NASCAR’s top level. Instead, Reddin is a business man. He is a marketing-geared executive who has had success in the past not on the track, but in the board room – remember the “When banks compete, you win,” that was Reddin’s brainchild.

Since then, Ray Evernham has sold the majority of his stake in the company and left the team that continued to carry his name – whether it is related or not is unclear. In addition, the team has gone through multiple struggles both on the track and behind closed doors.

This winter, when it became clear the state of Petty Enterprises was failing, the historic organization looked for another team to merge with in the Dodge camp. In January, Petty Enterprises and Gillett Evernham Motorsports joined forces and the new Richard Petty Motorsports was introduced. Richard Petty would serve as the face of the company; however it was unclear how involved the King would be with the team.

Also during the off-season, the team attempted to replace Elliott Sadler with AJ Allmendinger behind the wheel of the No. 19 Dodge. By doing so, the team would have violated the terms of Sadler’s contract, so Sadler filed suit. Attracting immediate attention, the team resolved the issue by reinstating Sadler and adding Allmendinger on a part-time basis.

With all the drama behind them and the season ready to start, the RPM cars performed well at the season-opening race in Daytona. Kahne was caught up in a wreck, but Sadler was leading late in the event and Allmendinger – who raced his way into the show – wound up third. Reed Sorenson, driving the famed No. 43, also scored a top-10 finish that day.

However, since then, week-in and week-out the RPM cars are at the bottom of the speed charts in practice and once the green flag drops, the team struggles to contend for top-10 and top-15, much less the win. There has been a lot of speculation as to why this team has struggled so much as of late, but for driver Kasey Kahne the answer is simple – weight and engines.

The driver of the No. 9 Budweiser Dodge explained the team’s cars are simply too heavy to compete and the engines are not producing the power needed to show up on the charts. Those two problems create more issues when the teams struggle to determine whether a set-up works right or not because of the lack of speed.

“I think all of our guys on the team are really frustrated right now,” Kahne explained Monday afternoon. “AJ was really frustrated after qualifying. Elliott’s been frustrated. Reed really hasn’t been, he’s been doing pretty good though. I think Reed’s been doing pretty well the last couple weeks. He’s been racing really well and being smart, he hasn’t been that fast, but he’s been getting a good finish – the best finish that he can. Things have worked out for him. I think Reed’s done the best job out of all four of us out of the last two-three weeks, not because of speed, but because things have worked out for him and he’s been in the right place.

“We just got to figure it out,” Kahne went on to say. “As a team we got to figure it out and keep working together, hopefully sooner rather than later.”

Heading to Darlington this weekend, all four of the Richard Petty Motorsports cars are outside the top-15 in the standings. Kahne leads the team in seventeenth in points, has the best average start of 14.8 and best average finish of 18th. Since Martinsville, Allmendinger has dropped from 15th in points to 28th, while Sadler has started 32nd or worse in the last four events.

“My concern has been the same for a while,” Kahne pointed out. “Sometimes, early in the year and at the end of last year, I’d tell them my concern and they’d basically look at you and I think it would go in one ear and out the other and they’d go on with their day and on with whatever they were doing as far as the people running Richard Petty Motorsports. But in the last three weeks they’ve really started to think about it and realize, ‘Hey, our cars are really heavy, our engines really don’t run and they’re starting to work on that.”

Coincidently, it was only a matter of weeks ago that Kahne indicated he may look elsewhere if the team does not pick up the pace.

“I didn’t really mean anything by that,” Kahne said of his comments. “I just said that I want to win, that’s really all I meant by that, so let’s figure out how to win.”

While Kahne believes Richard Petty brings a competitive nature to the upper level management of the team, he admits, “I don’t know how much he’s involved with the competition side of things either. He’s a great motivator, he’s great to have at the track and to be a part of Richard Petty Motorsports and I think encouraging everybody, but at the end of the day I don’t think he’s a huge part of the competition side and we need somebody on the competition side to step up and say, ‘Hey, we’re behind and we need to fix it.’”

One thing that would help this team drastically seems to be the implementation of the new Dodge engine. Penske Racing has made the switch and it is clear their results have greatly improved. Kurt Busch is contending for the lead in the series standings, while Sam Hornish Jr. gets better each and every week.

Richard Petty Motorsports has tested one of the new Dodge engines on the dyno, however Kahne is unsure of when the team will use the engine in competition. As far as the hold up, Kahne argued it’s all a matter of opinion.

“Just depends who you talk to,” he said of the engine situation. “Some people say Dodge, some people say money, some people say we’re taking a break, we’re going to Toyota. There’s just all different ways to look at it and say ‘why are we not running that.’ I have my own kind of theory on it all, but it’s just a theory.”

Kahne would not elaborate on his theory, however sources close to the situation have indicated the team is suffering from a number of issues ranging from financial problems to in-house conflicts amongst engineers.

Whatever the problems may be, they need to be addressed as soon as possible. Ten races into the 2009 season and this organization is on the brink of failure. With two of the biggest names in sports – Richard Petty and George Gillett – the results should be much more than they are. True, racing is a business, but without success on the track there will never be success in the board room.

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