This King Isn’t Ready to Step Down Yet : Motor racing: Petty looks faster than he has in the past few years, but everyone still asks about the “R” word.

My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,

My soul the father; and these two beget

A generation of still-breeding thoughts . . .

--Act II, Scene 2, Shakespeare’s Richard II Times are changing on me now. I know that I’m as far as I’m ever going to go.

--King Richard I, autobiography of Richard Petty

One side of the red and blue trailer parked near the track is open to the noonday sun. The crowd in front of the mobile department store is mixed: male, female, old, young, Southern-accented, speaking in the sterile strains of the Midwest and the nasal North.

Its common thread is its purchases: posters, calendars, jackets--anything that can be stamped, silk-screened, embossed or embroidered with the sun-glassed, cowboy-hatted, mustachioed icon peering out with a smile that is as much a part of Dixie as Rhett and Scarlett.

The old South erected statues of its heroes and built towns around them. The new South puts them on T-shirts and sells them for $10 outside the Daytona International Speedway.

“Richard Petty’s the Babe Ruth of NASCAR,” says Jerry L. Copeland, of Greenville, N.C., from behind the counter of the trailer.

“Yeah, Babe Ruth,” echoes a customer.

But Babe Ruth grew old and left the Yankees to become a sideshow with the Boston Braves and Brooklyn Dodgers.

“He’s the King,” says Mike Tarvin, from Clearwater, Fla. Tarvin wears a Petty T-shirt and sips from a cold can of beer as he tells of visiting the court at Level Cross, N.C. “It was about two years ago, and we drove all night to get there ‘cause I heard they were havin’ an open house. Met him on his front porch and had our picture taken with him. I got them pictures blowed up eight by 10 and stuck ‘em in an album. My kids are fans, too, because they met him.”

“We signed him because he was the King,” says Andy Granatelli, who lives near Santa Barbara, and was the STP head who lured Petty into a contract that has run 19 years.

But heirs assume the thrones of deposed monarchs. Is the King dead? Long live the King.

Richard Petty is comfortable talking in historical terms because it’s expected and has become part of the role he plays. Besides, the present isn’t as kind. Two hundred victories in Winston Cup events. Nobody has won more. Nobody has driven more: 1,098 races. Most victories in a season: 27. Most consecutive victories: 10. Most from a pole position: 61. In a season: 15. At one track: 15.

And on and on and on. But the records date to a time when racing was the South’s only link to the big leagues.

NASCAR’s record book is divided into all-time driver records and modern-day marks even though the organization is just beginning its 41st year. You sense that the separation has Petty in mind, because the modern marks--from 1972--show Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt and Bill Elliott as the current hotshots and winners of more money in a decade than Petty has won in a lifetime.

It’s a reflection of racing, a business-sport that is a curious mixture of fact and fancy. It is at once historical and unforgiving. You’re only as good as your last race, or your last season. Richard Petty last won on July 4, 1984, in a Pontiac that is on display at the American History Museum of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

He’s coming off a $133,050 season in which five NASCAR drivers won more than $1 million. The dreaded “retirement” has advanced beyond mutter to being outspoken by some who see heroism in present terms and have little use for tarnished crowns.

But not by the old guard, who are legion. “He’s the one driver in NASCAR who can go years without a win and still retain his popularity,” Copeland says. The crowd at the counter agrees, and one says, “Amen.”

And not by Petty, an admitted old dog who is trying to learn the new tricks of corporate racing. Who finally understands the game has passed the days in which he could drive his daddy’s Plymouth to the track, and Lee, the family patriarch, would buckle himself in and win. Who turned an accidental color into Petty Blue--”We didn’t have enough paint to paint the car. We had a gallon of blue and a gallon of white, so we mixed it,” said Dale Inman, then as now the crew chief of the Petty team--and then turned down $50,000 to refute Petty Blue for STP red.

He has found awakened horsepower in Pontiacs that were pastured instead of running with the Fords and Chevrolets generating seven-figure incomes.

Engineers have harnessed those horses for the Petty crew in the shop in Level Cross. Richard Petty already knew how to drive the team.

“Hard-headed,” is the Petty answer to questions about why it took so long. “(Factory help) was there for me to begin with. I just didn’t ask for it. Then I sat down and said, ‘I’m getting farther and farther behind.’ ”

Four years have been lost in casting about in historical dark. At Daytona, there suddenly seems light. Petty went193.623 m.p.h., 11th best in last Saturday’s qualifying. He finished a strong fweent ifth in Thursday’s first of two 125-mile qualifying races, and he led that race for 16 laps, overtaking the Fords and Chevys that passed him in a season that ended only three months ago.

He will start today’s Daytona 500 in the 11th position and is branded by Ned Jarrett, a former competitor and current CBS analyst, as “one of the 10 drivers that can win this race.”

If he does, the left turn into Victory Lane will be a familiar one. He’s won it seven times--but not since 1981.

There was then, and there is now, and the link between the two is Petty, a banged-up 52-year-old man whose neck has been broken twice, who has driven with broken ribs and the occasional bum knees, and who will drive the race wearing a mask to filter out the carbon monoxide that he has breathed for more than 30 years.

He seems to have found the Fountain of Youth in a rejuvenated motor for his Pontiac. Ponce de Leon should have looked in Daytona--or maybe Detroit.

“What happened is we looked back and said, ‘We’ve been doing this for 30 years, 40 years and we’ve been winning races all those years and our system’s been good and it’s been working,’ ” Petty says. “But now, all of a sudden you’ve got people like (car owner Rick) Hendrick coming in, you’ve got three or four teams . . . Those people come in and they organize differently than what we do ‘cause they’re business people and they say, ‘I think this is the way it ought to be organized.’ They put more money in it, and they do things differently and, all of a sudden, their situation is better than ours.

“We’re still doing it the old way, so, for us to get the deal, we have to modernize, too. We have to rethink the situation and approach it from a different angle.”

It’s the angle of the corporate entity replacing the single proprietorship. The Harvard Business School of racing.

There is candor in admitting mistakes, and there is no sharing of blame. The Pettys have been on hard times because “I was just slow in (adopting more modern methods of running a racing operation),” the boss said.

The bank should have given him a clue. When Petty won 27 of NASCAR’s 48 races in 1967, prize money totaled $130,275. The winner of today’s Daytona 500 will earn about $200,000.

“It used to be a $50,000, $100,000 business,” Petty says. “Now it’s a $3-million, $4-million business.”

“When I started out with STP, I think they paid our team $300,000. Now, it’s more like $3 million.”

Pencil and paper have given way to computer, and the owner-operator is as passe as the ’39 Ford coupe that Red Byron drove in winning the first NASCAR race, a 150-miler on the old beach course at Daytona in 1949.

A team includes a driver, crew chief, team manager and owner, sponsor support and an assortment of specialists ranging from people to milk every bit of energy from an engine to those who change tires in seconds under pressure on a hot Sunday afternoon.

Then there is Petty Enterprises, whose driver, owner and last word on expense is one person. When the driver approves the purchase of a $25 sponge to clean a windshield, as Petty did Tuesday, you sense a hip-pocket operation doomed to see back bumpers on Sunday afternoons.

“I don’t think anybody here today is successful doing it (that way),” says Junior Johnson, a driving contemporary of the young Petty and his daddy, Lee, one of NASCAR’s founding fathers. Johnson owns Geoff Bodine’s Ford that won the first 125-mile qualifying race Thursday by staying on the track while others were pitting for gas.

But Petty tries. As much as he talks of modern business management, the operation remains Richard Petty and family and friends. He said that he has backed away from some of the hands-on aspects of preparing the car, but Inman, a cousin and link to the old days, said, “I don’t notice that much difference.”

It’s a stubbornness that’s a part of Richard Petty, said son Kyle, who broke out of the family operation in 1985, and who drives for Felix Sabates, the U.S. importer of the Nintendo video game.

“Unless he’s got total control, he’s not happy, because that’s just the kind of person he is,” says Kyle. “He’s always driven for himself, and you take a man who’s worked for himself for 20 or 30 years, it’s hard for him to go in and take orders from somebody else, no matter what profession he’s in . . . He’s pretty opinionated and has his own way of thinking about things. He’s not going to take another man’s thoughts and say, ‘That sounds good to me, I’ll do it that way.’ ”

“I try to separate Petty Enterprises from Richard Petty, and that’s hard for me to do,” Petty admits. “If I had you driving the car, then I could spend all my time working on the race car. Or if I had you working on the car, I could spend all my time being Richard Petty.”

Being Richard Petty is easy because it’s natural to someone who is gregarious and outgoing. But it is difficult because it’s time-consuming.

His chief sponsor, STP, demands a return on its investment, and there is a shared loyalty that is part of Petty’s makeup and the 19-year affiliation between the two. “I’m just like anybody else,” Petty says. “I’ve got 24 hours a day to do two jobs. I ain’t smart enough to do two jobs. . . . The way it is, I sacrifice on both sides because I’m doing too much. I’m the only one from yonder to here . . . that’s in the past 15 to 20 years owned, driven and maintained his own race car . . . You talk about J.D. McDuffie and Dave Marcis, they own their own car, maintain their own car and drive their own car. But I’m doing it in a different echelon.”

His current straits have made the job even more difficult, casting him in what he calls a “Catch-22 situation.”

“I feel obligated to do it. From a P.R. standpoint, I’ve got to do it because I’m not doing too good in the race car. If I was doing better in the race car, I could say ‘forget that, because I’m giving you enough out of the race car.’ But I’m not giving you enough P.R. out of the race car.”

If public relations means winning, he’s not. But the industry has other ways of measuring public relations value. In the Sponsor Report, an annual measure of television exposure that is not paid commercial time, STP ranked fourth in 1989 behind Tide, Kodiak (a smokeless tobacco) and Budweiser. According to Judy Lafreniere of the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based firm, STP realized $4,077,140 in “free” advertising from NASCAR racing a year ago. That means Petty, and it’s also the reason that STP officials refute a report last fall that they were unhappy with their investment in Petty.

“He was on ’60 Minutes’ in December for 13 minutes,” says Dick Emerick, STP’s racing director. “That’s 13 minutes, and what does commercial time cost on ’60 Minutes’--a million dollars a minute?

“We’ve told him that as long as he’s running, we’re behind him. He’s probably provided a lot more for us than we’ve ever provided for him.”

Still, the question remains: Is the King dead? Is it time to pass the crown to another generation of Pettys?

Can Petty compete with drivers who weren’t born when he drove for the first time in Columbia, S.C., in 1958, or won his first race two years later? Can he safely handle a car that is tailgating another in a draft and covering a football field a second?

Darrell Waltrip says Petty should leave the driving to younger men, suggesting he help pioneer a senior racing circuit in the genre of golf and baseball. “There should be a mandatory retirement age,” Waltrip says, adding that “fifty is a nice round number.”

But that opinion is not universally shared. “That’s . . . ,” says Rusty Wallace, flatly. “He’s the only older guy of his age that I feel comfortable (drafting with). Him and A.J. (Foyt), because they’ve been around so damn long. Stock car racing is more of a damn mental game than a physical game.”

Petty drove against Joe Weatherly, who died at Riverside. He drove against Fireball Roberts, who died at Charlotte, and Jim Paschal, who died at Talladega.

He drove against Bobby Allison, who has retired after a crash. And Johnson, who left the game in 1965. And David Pearson and Cale Yarborough, car owners now. Petty competes with second-generation NASCAR drivers Dale Earnhardt, Davey Allison and his own son, Kyle. He spans generations, but he has seen a generation gap pass his car at Rockingham and Dover and Daytona.

He understands his limitations, the greatest of which is time. “(Last year) our race car was not good enough, and the driver was not good enough to overcome the race car,” he says. “If I was 25 or 30 years old, I might do better with the car as it was . . . I might not be capable of getting everything out of a car, but I’m still capable of winning races.”

Including the Daytona 500? “We didn’t go from No. 1 to 50 all at once,” Petty says. “We went from No. 1 to No. 2 to No. 3 . . . We won’t get back to No. 1 at once . . . (But) we’ve come farther this year than anybody, and it’s got us all excited.”

Would a victory be the catalyst for retirement? Will he go out on top? “Maybe,” Jarrett says. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

It’s not that cut and dried, says Petty. There is no plan. “If I have a bad year, or if I have a good year or the best year I’ve ever had, it’s not going to determine when I say ‘the heck with it.’ ”

“He doesn’t want to leave Petty Enterprises this way,” says Lynda Petty, Richard’s wife of 30 years. “He doesn’t want to hire a driver who will come in and say, ‘I’ll come in and race for a while and then move on to a good team.’ ”

Petty’s brother, Maurice, gives a clue to why Richard continues. “It’s like a cat on drugs,” says Maurice Petty, part of Petty Enterprises until 1984. “In a way, a cat on drugs is lucky. He dies and it’s over. But a guy hooked on racin’ just has to race.”

Petty’s qualifying race Thursday convinced some that there remain miles to run. “Richard Petty’s performance was great,” Bodine says. “There have been lots of rumors floating around about Richard Petty. Is he going to retire? Are any of you saying that now?”

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

--Act III, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Richard II

None of us really can tell you when that day will come; I know I can’t. But I’ll be the first one to know when that day comes for me.

--King Richard I, autobiography of Richard Petty