September 2, 2009
By Rebecca Gladden
According to Bobby Labonte's verified Twitter account (Twitter.com/Bobby_Labonte), the 2000 Sprint Cup Series champion likes playing racquetball, attends lots of family cookouts, and goes on 40-mile bike rides to help relieve stress.
Those are just a few interesting details of Labonte's life that his 8000-plus followers have learned by reading his updates, known to Twitter members as 'tweets.'
"It's a way to interact with the fans and let them know about things that I'm doing or how I'm feeling," Labonte told me in a recent phone interview.
"I've got 8880 followers that either respond back, or know that we're having a good week, or 'hey, we're doing this and we're doing that.' It's a way for people to know what's going on in my life if they're curious about it."
Labonte is one of just a few Cup drivers currently participating on Twitter, but the flow of information isn't only from driver to fans. A few weeks ago in the Michigan Cup race, Labonte lost an engine early on and finished the race 43rd. That evening, he apologized to his fans via Twitter, writing, "Engine broke on lap 2. Feel bad for the guys. We tried to milk it, but was going to damage more than was worth while. Sorry."
Almost immediately, Labonte was deluged with reassuring notes from fans telling him that they were still behind him and that the engine failure was not his fault. "I think it's just a neat deal where you kind of get your spirits lifted up sometimes," he told me.
But Twitter is not the only internet technology that the Cup veteran has embraced. After parting ways with Petty Enterprises at the end of last season, Labonte spent a large portion of the off-season looking for a sponsor as well as a ride. In what he describes as a last-minute deal, he landed at Hall of Fame Racing with Ask.com - an internet search engine - as his primary sponsor.
When I spoke with Labonte late last week, it was shortly before news broke that he would be sharing his ride for the remainder of the 2009 season with part-time Nationwide driver Erik Darnell and, if he knew of the impending announcement, he didn't let on.
The decision was not based on performance, but on sponsorship ties, as Ask.com was only scheduled to be on the hood of the No. 96 car for 29 of the year's 36 races. The search engine firm signed a one-year contract with Hall of Fame Racing in its new '09 alignment with Yates Racing.
Overall, the partnership between Labonte and Ask.com has been successful during the organization's first foray into NASCAR sponsorship. As recently as this past weekend, Ask.com ran a big promotion inviting fans to query the search engine about how Sprint Cup drivers would be spending their off-weekend, with an opportunity to win autographed prizes from Labonte and others.
In terms of performance, Labonte has done a good job keeping the team above the critical 35th-place demarcation for Cup qualifying, while also bringing with him a past champion's provisional if needed. A highlight of the year was the team's top-five finish at Las Vegas in March, but since then they've only cracked the top-15 once - a 12th in the Coca-Cola 600.
I asked Labonte to explain, from the perspective of a former champion and long-time team member of powerhouse Joe Gibbs Racing, what factors make the biggest difference between being a first-place car and a 30th-place car.
"Oh, wow. It's a lot. It is a lot," he said. "Take Jimmie Johnson, for example. He's been driving for Hendrick Motorsports for at least seven or eight years, and that organization started back in the late '50s and they've won a lot of races. You can just see their facility and see how things are run and obviously that's a well-oiled machine. A big part of it is the drivers and the confidence that they have and the cars that they put on the racetrack week in and week out. It's kind of hard to overcome what they have sometimes, but I think that's just the way that is.
"Every team tries to get to that point. It's no different if you're a single-car team trying to get there or a multi-car team trying to get there and trying to be as competitive as you can, but you're not quite there. They're the ones that are probably on top the most, but there are times when they're not as competitive as they want to be either and they have years that are better than others. It's hard to stay on top and they probably do it the best of all of them. But sometimes you take one step forward and two steps back and another step forward and two steps back."
Despite the struggles and setbacks, however, Labonte sounded hopeful last week that the situation at Hall of Fame Racing would improve.
"I think that we could be better than we are. Basically, this is our first year in a lot of ways for Hall Of Fame Racing and getting hooked up with Yates Racing. It kind of came about on the twelfth-hour of the deal and it's still … if you look at the 25 years that Hendrick's been at it, you can see the difference when someone has been doing it for a long time.
"But I think that we, as a team, need to keep building and getting stronger and stronger. Everybody's got to pull together. You try to do the best you can. You know, it's a team sport."
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