news-record.com

Soon, the race shop where the Pettys built winning cars and made a tiny community famous will hold only memories.

Roaring engines no longer will drown out the song of birds. Whiney air guns won't pierce the quiet of the countryside. Those white asymmetrical buildings, nothing like today's castles that teams build, will house something other than race cars designed for NASCAR's top circuit.

Petty Enterprises is leaving Level Cross.

Since 1949, the Pettys have been on Branson Mill Road. It was there that Lee Petty forged the family's path in racing that spanned four generations. He worked on his car over a dirt floor in the reaper shed by the family's home. Sons Richard and Maurice followed, and their success made the No. 43 one of the sport's most iconic images.

"You walked through the gates in Level Cross, you walked into NASCAR history," Richard Petty said Wednesday.

Next season, the cars of Kyle Petty and Bobby Labonte will be built in a race shop in Mooresville, the team announced Wednesday. The Pettys have signed a two-year lease to work in the shop Robert Yates Racing built. Yates will move out after this season to a new building.

The Pettys' departure leaves Bill Davis Racing in High Point as the only Nextel Cup team based in the Triad.

Richard Petty said he's unsure what the family will do with the Level Cross race shop, which they used to win 268 NASCAR races, 10 series championships and nine Daytona 500s. They might move the team's museum back there or use it to house show cars.

The move was inevitable because the Pettys last won a race in 1999, last won a title in 1979 and last won a Daytona 500 in 1981. Labonte ranks 19th in the driver standings and is trying to give Petty Enterprises its first top-20 finish since John Andretti placed 17th in 1999.

Moving locations will make it easier to find employees -- most Cup teams are based in the Charlotte area -- and will ease the burden on those who have made the long drive daily. Petty estimated that only 20 of the team's 120 employees lived near the shop.

"It's not the buildings as much as it is the personnel that we hope to be able to attract," Petty said of the move. "Not that they wouldn't like to work at Petty Enterprises, they just can't uproot their families a lot of times and move. So we said, OK, if this is where the core of people are, maybe we'll look to going where the core is at."

The Wood Brothers were the last team to leave home for the Charlotte area. In 2003, the team moved from Stuart, Va., for many of the same reasons. But moving doesn't guarantee success: The Wood Brothers haven't finished in the top 20 in the driver standings since.

Some will consider this a sad day for the sport -- the last of the longtime teams leaving their home -- but Richard Petty isn't as downcast about the team's move.

"It's a deal where you're cutting traditions ... but then it's a jubilant day because you're looking to do better," he said. "You're looking at the opportunity to go and do some of the stuff that maybe we used to accomplish. That is our goal.

"We felt we were sort of in a box. We were not going to be able to accomplish it where we're at under the same management and the same way we were running business forever.

"We have to go into a new era of our business."

Contact Dustin Long at 373-7062 or dlong@news-record.com