Trading places: Petty, Labonte could switch seats (cont'd)

Petty said he blames mostly himself for the precarious position in which his team currently finds itself. He sat out six races to move into the television broadcast booth for TNT, and missed another scheduled start after breaking his hand in frustration following an early exit from a race at Watkins Glen.

He said that his team draws confidence from some of the successes Labonte has enjoyed in the No. 43 car, but that it is difficult to draw comparisons between the organization's two teams.

"You're comparing apples to oranges," Petty said. "Remember, I sat out six races in the middle of the year. I broke my hand and sat out [another]. I've hindered this team more than anything else, with my actions. I think this is a good, solid team. Probably if they had a good, solid driver for all 36 races, it would be a better team than what they are.

"Chad [McCumbee] did a good job for us, and John [Andretti] did a good job for us [as substitute drivers]. We've run different drivers through here and they all did a good job for us -- but at the same time, you look at it and say, 'Hmmm. That throws a kink in everything.' It upsets the apple cart right in the middle of the season.

"We should be better than what we are, and we feel like we are better than where we are in points. I don't think we're probably as solid a team as the 43 is, but we're not the 35th-place team, either. We should be in the top 20 or 25."

Although he plans to run a similar schedule next year -- he's under contract to move to the TNT broadcast booth for another six races -- Petty insisted that this year's experiences will help make 2008 better.

"We'll be better next year doing it because we know what to expect. It's just like I say with Bobby: the first year I don't think he realized how big a step it was to go from Gibbs to Petty Enterprises, how big a building process it was," Petty said. "Once he understood the building process, he understood what he had to do and what his team had to do to move forward, and I think they've done that this year.

"I think for us [in the No. 45] this year, we threw it out there and said, 'Hey, guess what? Your driver is going to get out of the car for six races and sit on his butt and talk about you guys from the booth.' You don't know what it means until you get there and you do it. But now that you understand how it flows and what it is, I think we'll understand how to make it work better -- how to take whatever negatives there are in that from a team aspect, and mitigate that damage to get more positive results in those six races."

And if all else fails, plan to fall back on the legal switch of cars. Kyle has still another possibility floating around in his head, too.

"We've got Richard Petty. Put him in there," he said of his famous father, now 70, who owns a record seven driving championships and presumably all the provisional start benefits that go along with them.

Kyle was joking, of course.

Or at least he appeared to be.