Richard Petty is NASCAR history

By Mike Mulhern
Media General News Service
Published: July 15, 2008

Richard Petty has been involved in racing for well over 50 years and has seen it all ... and then some.
Over the past few days, NASCAR marketers have been helping him celebrate the 50th anniversary of his first NASCAR start, taking him to New York City, Chicago and elsewhere. In a year that NASCAR’s Brian France has labeled “Back to Basics” it doesn’t get any more basic in stock-car racing than Richard Petty.
Every weekend, no matter where the tour stops, there’s Petty, roaming the garage, checking out the competition, talking, thinking, pondering. “I do everything I’ve always done....” He says. “I just don’t get in the car when they say ‘Drivers, start your engines’.
“Us old-timers, and old-time fans, remember their time in the sun ... the way they remembered it, the way they grew up with it.
“But as we progressed, as the country changed, as society changed, the fans changed. So we’ve got to create something different than what our granddaddy or our daddies think.
“We have to have a new show, or a new situation to draw new fans. And without the fans we wouldn’t be sitting here talking. So we’ve got to say ‘OK, what do the fans really want to see, and what do they expect NASCAR racing to be?’”.
The late Benny Parsons once said that everyone who cares about NASCAR racing should make it a point to shake Petty’s hand ... because without the King, quite simply, the sport wouldn’t be anything like it is today. Not because of what he did on the track, although that was pretty amazing. But rather because of what he did off it. When the race was over, Petty would sit on the pit wall and sign autographs until the sun set and everybody else had gone home.
Back in the early 1970s, when Detroit carmakers bailed out and left the France family hanging in the wind, Richard Petty and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and Junior Johnson and the Woods were all that stood between the sport and disaster.
“RJR, when the Winston brand got involved in 1971, they cut the schedule back; we were running 47 or 48 races a year, and they cut it back to 28 races,” Petty recalled. “We were lucky enough in ‘72 to get STP as a sponsor, the first nationwide sponsor in Cup racing. Between RJR and STP, the first thing you knew, people in New Hampshire knew about us, and people in Wisconsin, and people in Texas ... because we were like pre-advertised.
“Then it comes along with a little TV, and then comes along with a big TV deal, and that put us out there in everybody’s deal. And then they started building racetracks in other parts of the country, Chicago, Kansas City, Phoenix.”
Considering NASCAR history, Richard Petty is the NASCAR history book all by himself.
“It’s just I’ve survived these years I guess more than anything else,” he says. “I come along on the history: I was 10 years old when I ran my first race ... and I went to the very first Cup race they had, in 1949 in Charlotte, with my father, when I was like 11 years old.
“So I’ve been there ever since NASCAR started ... just come along at the right time to grow up with NASCAR.”
Petty’s father, Lee, wasn’t exactly a model of gentility. In his first race, Richard Petty recalls: “I was running around getting lapped and my dad knocked me in the wall. I wound up in the wall, and he ended up winning the race ... so it wasn’t all bad.”
The next season, 1959, the Pettys helped the France family open Daytona.
The contrast between Petty, now 71, and the sport’s newest hotshot, 23-year-old Kyle Busch, is interesting. Petty has been there, done that, and he knows what happens next: “I tell the story that in ‘71 and ‘72 we won the championship and a bunch of races ... and then in ‘73 we couldn’t win anything. It was just a bad year. And we had the same car, same crew, same engine, same deal....
“Then we came back in ‘74 and ‘75 and won championships again.
“So when you’re on a roll, you just have to take advantage of it ... because a lot of times you don’t know why you’re there. Working hard will keep you there - but sometimes just slaps you down....
“It’s just a different ballgame out there now - in how these guys approach it, the equipment they have, the backing they have from sponsors. I would have liked to be in my prime today, and been in a car capable of winning, and go out and race with these guys.”
Through it all Petty says that his biggest accomplishment might be quite simple - “Just being here.
“If you looked at all of those wrecks I had over 35 years (from 1958 until 1992) or whatever.....”
Now Petty can just roll with the punches. Yes, he just sold the majority stake in the family business, Petty Enterprises, to some Boston investment company. But he’s running things.
And Petty has never been one to dwell much on the past. “I never sat there and said ‘Look what you’ve done ... because it was a deal that was just moving all the time.”
Petty will say, “I just think I was a lucky son-of-a-gun to be born at the right place at the right time under the right circumstances, with a little bit of talent, and a lot of talented people around me, to put me in a position to be where I’m at today.”
In truth, the sport was lucky that Richard Petty came along when he did. Like Miles Davis in jazz, and Michael Jordan in basketball, Richard Petty not only helped define the sport at particular points in time but helped redefine it time and time again.
Now, though, Petty Enterprises isn’t in such great shape. It is slowly, slowly being rebuilt, and fitfully in this era of mega-teams with $25 million to $30 million budgets.
There is pressure on Kyle Petty, Richard’s son, who is now 48. The company hasn’t won a big NASCAR tour race since 1999, and Kyle Petty hasn’t won since 1995. Bobby Labonte, Kyle’s teammate, is looking for his first tour win since 2003.
Part of the problem, of course, is of the Pettys’ own making, not keeping up with the times. But another part of the problem is NASCAR’s willingness to let the sport be dominated by the rich and powerful.
During the Pettys’ reign, talent and tricks were the keys. Now it’s money. But Petty thinks that fans might want to see a little more parity among teams, and not a few mega-teams dominating.
“NASCAR (two years ago) cut it right down, they thought, to four-car teams,” Petty says. “But people are going to figure ways around that. So they have satellite operations that have two or three or four cars, too. Some of these teams are operating right today with six or eight cars, even though they are not all coming out of the same shop, even though they have different names, different owners, different deals ... they still use the same technology.
“How NASCAR controls that, I don’t know. And I don’t know if they know. But it could be done. Or it could come down to four or five owners, and I don’t think that would be good.”
The Pettys are trying to find the right track to run on. They have signed Labonte to a new contract, despite losing their major sponsor to rival Richard Childress.
“(Labonte’s) our building-block, somebody very steady and competitive, to build around. I think that gives him confidence, he’ll work with whomever we bring in - whether it’s a younger driver, older driver.”
And this is certainly a turning-point season for the Pettys. “We’ve got to look to the future here,” Richard Petty said. “Richard Petty and Petty Enterprises sat down with Kyle and said ‘OK, we’re going to have to do something, show some kind of progress here so.’”.
So they signed a deal with Boston Ventures to become stronger financially. “That was the hardest move I’ve probably ever made,” Richard Petty concedes.
That should be a warning to the sport’s owners that racing is changing in ways still difficult to understand.