It’s Like His Home : Richard Petty’s Final Tour Begins at Daytona, Where He Is Legend

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. —  The first time Richard Petty drove a stock car at Daytona International Speedway, he was black flagged. Ordered off the track before he even got in a lap.

It was 1959. He was a rookie in NASCAR. So was the track.

“I came down here, a 21-year-old kid, and when I came through the tunnel, it looked as big as the state of North Carolina,” Petty recalled Monday as though it were only yesterday.

“There was really nothing here, no buildings and no fences. It was humungous. There was a rope around the lake, a guardrail around the track and few grandstands. That was about it.”

Because no one had ever run on the 31-degree banking, NASCAR and speedway president Bill France told drivers to take three or four laps down on the flat to get used to the feel of the track before they went up on the banking.

“It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen,” Petty continued. “I’d seen Darlington (the original super speedway), but I’d never run there. I got in my car--it was an Olds convertible--and I was flat out down on the apron when I headed for the second turn, and up I went on the banking. And out came the black flag. They weren’t too keen on a young kid driving like that.”

In that year’s Daytona 500, the kid’s fortunes weren’t much improved. He lasted only eight laps before his engine gave out.

“There were 54 cars in that race, and I was back in the pack. It was one of the last races where they had convertibles and hardtops, too. My convertible was geared to run about 130 (m.p.h.), but the hardtops were running 140. Well, I found out that if I tucked in close and ran with the fast cats, I could keep up. But it wasn’t long before the engine tuckered out. It just wasn’t used to going that fast, even with some help, if you know what I mean.”

Petty, now 54, has announced this will be his final season as a driver, so this week with the Daytona 500, he is starting what has become known as the 1992 Fan Appreciation Tour.

“Coming to Daytona is like coming home,” Petty said. “This is the place that made Richard Petty. I’ve had a good run here, and I think mainly it’s because we started out together, me and the track, in ’59. Lots of the old-timers, like my daddy (Lee, winner of the 1959 Daytona 500), Joe Weatherly, Buck Baker--cats that’d been around awhile, they didn’t like it at all. It was so different from what they’s used to running it was tough on ‘em, but me, I didn’t know any different, so however the car felt, that’s all I knew.”

Thursday, in one of the Twin 125 qualifying races for Sunday’s main event, Petty will make his 102nd start at Daytona. He has won 11 of them: seven 500s, three Firecracker 400s and one qualifying race. No one else has won more than four 500s here.

His first superspeedway victory was here in 1964, and his last victory anywhere, the 200th of his Winston Cup career, was here on the Fourth of July 1984.

Elizabeth Petty, Richard’s mother, is here for her son’s final Daytona 500. Like Richard, she marvels at the changes 33 years have made.

“The track was way out in the boondocks then, so far from Daytona Beach,” she said. “I remember we had no idea what to expect. We had always raced on the beach before, and now there was this big place miles from nowhere.

“Racing was a day-to-day thing then. There was no planning ahead. You heard about a race and you went. People ask me if Richard had planned to be a race driver when he was little. I tell them no, because there wasn’t anything to plan. One day he was a little boy, racing wagons with his brother (Maurice) and his cousin (Dale Inman). The next day he was working on his dad’s race car. Then one day he was racing himself. Things just happened. There was no planning.”

Richard puts it this way: “When I was a kid, working on the car, I figured my dad would race forever, and I’d always be in the pits. When you’re young, you never think about your parents getting old.”

Elizabeth Petty had another role in the team’s beginnings.

“I always cooked some fried chicken and brought cold drinks because there weren’t any fancy eating places at tracks like today. I wanted the boys to have some nourishing food and not have to eat those race track hot dogs in a cold bun. We made a picnic out of going to races.”

Inman, Petty’s best friend and crew chief for 198 of his 200 victories, was here in 1959, too.

“We had an old three-quarter ton GMC truck we towed Richard’s car with,” he said. “All the tools and equipment we had for two cars we loaded in the pickup. It was just me, Richard, Maurice, Lee and a friend with a passenger who pulled Lee’s car. It took about 12 hours to make the trip from Level Cross (N.C.). Today you can make it in a little over eight hours, unless you take the plane.

“Most of the time, for short trips, Lee would put in a new engine and drive the car to the track to break it in. He’d race it and drive it back home. Mrs. Petty would drive the pickup with the tools before we were old enough to drive. In those days, Lee would get cars from the local dealer and we’d fix them up best as we could to get ready for the race. All the guys did it that way.

“Now look at what we’ve got,” he said, waving his hand at the $150,000 18-wheel truck-trailer that hauls two hand-built race cars, about $500,000 worth of equipment and spare parts and has sleeping quarters for the driver. “We’ve got more stuff than we’d have thought was in the whole world back then. And back home there’s six more cars ready to race.”

They are not there in case Petty wrecks the ones that are here. Stock car racing has become so specialized that different cars are constructed for superspeedways, medium-length speedways, short tracks and road courses.

They are all blue-and-red No. 43, with STP and Pepsi on their sides. It is perhaps no coincidence that Petty’s two major sponsors have their name on Daytona’s races--the Daytona 500 by STP on Sunday and the Pepsi 400 on July 4.

Surprisingly, Petty selects a race he did not win, the 1976 Daytona 500, as his most memorable ride.

“The race with David (Pearson) stands out the most of all the races--win, lose or draw--that I’ve ever been in. David wound up winning the race, but it was still dramatic for me, if you know what I mean.”

That was the day Petty and Pearson raced side by side through the final lap. As they reached the fourth turn, Petty dropped to the inside, but when his car drifted back up the steep banking, it touched Pearson’s.

Both of them, Petty’s Dodge and Pearson’s Mercury, spun wildly off the track into the infield. Pearson slid to a stop near the entrance to pit row. Petty was closer to the finish line, perhaps only 35 yards away, but his engine was dead.

Pearson’s was still running, and he crept across to take the checkered flag going no more than 5 m.p.h. Petty ground on his starter to move the final yards but couldn’t make it.

“Richard hit me first,” Pearson said, and Petty admitted it. “I apologized for running into him,” Petty said. “It was all I could do, if you know what I mean.

“Ain’t never been a finish like that, and it ain’t likely there’ll ever be another one.”

Three years later, Petty received a gift from a similar accident. Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison were a half-lap ahead when Allison took the white flag. Yarborough drafted Allison down the 3,000-foot back straightaway, but when he tried to make a slingshot pass, Yarborough found his path blocked when Allison dropped down to the edge of the track.

Yarborough, forced into the grass, moved back onto the track and banged against Allison. As in ‘76, both cars went spinning into the muddy infield.

“I was sitting back there in third place when I got to the third corner and saw those cars sitting in the infield,” Petty recalled. “I figured something happened to those cats up front, so I stomped down on the pedal and kept Darrell (Waltrip) and A.J. (Foyt) behind me. I had me a win in the same circumstances as I’d lost to David.”

Not quite. No one apologized this time. While Petty was taking the checkered flag, more people were watching the fight that broke out in the infield between Yarborough and the Allison brothers. Bobby, after finishing 11th, came around to help his brother in an old fashioned bullring-type stock car brawl.

Petty’s first Daytona victory, in 1964, is a memorable one because it was his first on a superspeedway.

“Looking back on it, it was probably the easiest of all seven, but it didn’t seem like it that day,” he said. “We’d been running good in the shorter races because we had a good handling car, but we didn’t have the power for the big tracks. Then Chrysler came out with their hemi engine, and with all that power we just blowed everybody away.”

They blowed ‘em away so convincingly that NASCAR banned the hemi in 1966. Chrysler responded by boycotting NASCAR, so Petty went drag racing instead of defending his Daytona 500 crown.

His last 500 victory, in 1981, was special because it came after an ulcer led to having part of his stomach cut away. There were doubts that he would be back on top again. It was also a tearful victory because he and Inman had agreed to part company after the race. Inman masterminded the victory.

Bobby Allison, in a Pontiac, had dominated Speed Weeks. Near the end of the 500, he was battling with Buddy Baker and Dale Earnhardt for the victory. On their final pit stop, all three chose to change right-side tires for the stretch run. Their pit stops took from 15.2 seconds to 17.4 seconds.

Inman conferred with Petty on the radio and decided to stick with old tires and take on only fuel on the final stop. Petty was in and out in 7.8 seconds. His winning margin was 3.5 seconds over Allison.

“It was Dale and the crew that won that one,” Petty said.

Inman left the team, but returned five years later and is with his pal and cousin for the Fan Appreciation Tour.

All has not been peaches and cream for Petty at Daytona, however. There have been horrendous wrecks, like in 1961 when his car was bumped by Junior Johnson’s, became airborne and flew over the wall and out of the speedway; or the one in 1988 that made all the TV highlight films.

That was the one in which his 3,400-pound Pontiac Grand Prix pirouetted on its nose after a series of barrel rolls when it was center-punched by a trailing car.

“My gawd, he’s got to be dead,” a veteran reporter screamed in the press box.

But when Petty came out of the hospital later in the day, all he had was a sore ankle. Well, that was almost all. “What hurt most was my feelings because I’d wrecked my pocketbook when the car got torn up, if you know what I mean,” he said.

Through all those years, the good ones and the not so good ones, Petty was becoming one of the most respected and recognizable participants on the American sporting scene. Tall, at 6 feet 2, and thin, almost skinny, at 180 pounds, Petty was--and still is--a familiar figure with his wide-brimmed cowboy hat, wraparound dark glasses with the STP sticker in the corner, closely cropped mustache and cigar.

“He is one of the people who’s brought racing from when it wasn’t a very respectable sport to where it is today,” said Johnson, who raced against Richard’s father in the sport’s beginnings and now is one of its leading car owners.

Richard Petty is known, even by his son Kyle, also a race driver, as simply The King.

Now, even though he has not seen a checkered flag wave for him in 212 races over more than seven years, he is also the Pied Piper as he wanders through the vast Daytona racing complex. It seems as though everyone here wants his autograph, a picture taken with him or just a chance to shake his hand.

No athlete in the world seems as patient with his fans as The King.

“I figure those cats in the back have been standing there a long time, waiting,” he explained. “They deserve an autograph just like the ones in the front do.

“Every time you sign an autograph for them cats, it’s like giving them a Christmas present, if you know what I mean.”