Dear Bobby Labonte and Bobby Labonte Image Consultants:

I get madder than a polar bear in a steam room when somebody sees my Bobby Labonte regalia and asks me “Who is Bobby Labonte?”

“Does he work for Cheerios?” they say.  And I tell them no, Bobby Labonte does not work for Cheerios.  Cheerios work for Bobby Labonte.

I mean, it’s like walking through Hindustan with a Bible.  Everybody wants to know if it’s a good book.  Well, hell yes this is The Good Book, you would tell them, and they would nod and smile, but y’all are talking about two completely different things.

Truth of the matter here is that I need help.

Dale Jr. is killing us out there in the real world.  You can’t stagger through a god-dang mini-mart at five in the morning and not trip over an end-of-the-aisle display of Amp.  But I’ll be hogtied if you can find a vending machine worth the designation that dispenses a good old-fashioned bowl of General Mills product the way it oughta.

You all know even better than me that the association between a driver and his sponsor sells more than cereal — it sells the driver, too.  And I sure as shit know that Dale Jr. drinks Amp.  I’ve seen him do it forty-three times on ESPN 2 already today.  I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that Jeff Gordons wife’s boobs are made out of something special the DuPont company put together.  Ditto that I know Jeff puts on a diaper and puts those t!tt!es to good use.

But I can’t tell you if Bobby Labonte has ever had a Cheerio, or would even know one if the son I never met dumped a bowl full of them over his folically-challenged head.

Now y’all know I don’t pose a problem like this without also trying to help out with a solution.

Once this election is over and every soulless liberal I know is done sniffing the butt of Obama ads on TV, there is going to be an awful lot of unclaimed television time.  Let’s use the proceeds from Bobby Labonte’s 24th place finish at the Camping World RV 400 — that’s $124,761 — and buy us some of that tv time.  Then I want to see some ads that take Bobby Labonte back to the people.

Open scene: Bobby Labonte is sitting naked in a big bowl of milk.  A bunch of hot women start dumping Cheerios on top of him.  The hot women start eating the Bobby Labonte-infused cereal and making pleasurable noises. 

Ain’t nothing wrong with this picture — it’s what the kids call viral.  It’d be amazing.

Or how’s about this one? Open scene?  Bobby Labonte plays pranks on everybody in the race shop.  He fills their pantries with boxes of Cheerios and whenever somebody goes for some Pringles or beef jerky, he’s standing in the pantry naked and he hands them a box.

Too risque?  Open scene:  Bobby Labonte is eating breakfast in his silk pajamas — it’s his favorite — a giant bowl of Cheerios.  He gets up to get another bowl full of Cheerios, and his pajamas get caught on a nail in his table and rip those suckers right off him!

Trust me, any of these ideas is a surefire way to get BL noticed.  Take your pick.

We can just hand over the popularity contest to Dale Earnhardt and his miscreant son, but I’m neither ready nor willing to do that.  I want Bobby Labonte to be everywhere, and next time I see some dunderhead on the street and he eyes my Bobby Labonte t-shirt, I expect nothing less than instant recognition, and maybe even a little fear.

Own up to it, boys, no one is learning about Bobby during his Victory Lane interviews.  It’s time to think outside the cereal box…  And naked… it’s time to think naked.