A Petty Kingdom : On Nov. 15, King Richard, ‘One of a Kind’, Will Drive the Final of 1,185 NASCAR Races

Richard Petty once figured he would work on race cars and watch other people drive them. An unsettling thought for those who love stock car racing.

“I just can’t think where this sport would be without Richard Petty,” said Darrell Waltrip, a three-time series champion who was 12 years old when Petty drove in his first NASCAR event.

“NASCAR has grown up with Richard Petty,” Waltrip said. “He was a hero when I was a kid, and everything that stock car racing has become--the fans, the money, the TV--Richard had a hand in bringing to the sport.”

On Nov. 15, the 55-year-old icon, whose roots remain firmly planted in the neighboring towns of Randleman and Level Cross, N.C., where he was born, raised and still lives, will drive his last stock car race.

More than 120,000 spectators will pack Atlanta Motor Speedway to see him off, and millions more will watch on television as the man called “The King” makes his final competitive drive.

That fan interest is a far cry from the small, mostly local groups--usually too small to call a crowd--who watched NASCAR’s earliest races at the dusty speedbowls of the rural Southeast. When Lee Petty, Richard’s father and a Hall of Fame driver, was banging sheet metal on the tracks, he was a household name only in the Petty household.

“I don’t think Daddy ever thought about how big racing would be or what the future of it would be,” Richard said. “He just wanted to race cars and make enough money to be able to take care of his family and race some more. I sure never thought it would be like this.”

When Richard started going to the tracks, it was to help out with his daddy’s car. “Me and (brother) Maurice just liked to go along when we could,” he said. “That was the way we got to the racetrack, and, before I could drive, I just figured that I’d probably be working on the cars.”

But, like the old movies where the chorus girl gets her chance to replace the star and winds up an even bigger star, once Richard got behind the wheel, he stayed there.

Lee allowed his 21-year-old son to race for the first time at Columbia, S.C., in 1958 in a NASCAR convertible event. It went 200 laps on a half-mile dirt oval and Richard finished a respectable sixth.

“I guess I knew from that time on what I was going to do,” Richard said. “It just seemed natural.”

The first of an unprecedented 200 wins came two years later at Charlotte, N.C.

By the time The King steps from his trademark blue-and-red racer--it’s a Pontiac now, but he’s run Plymouths, Buicks, Dodges, Fords, Oldsmobiles and Chevrolets, too--for the last time, he will have competed in 1,185 NASCAR Winston Cup races.

His many records and accomplishments could fill up a Hall of Fame by themselves.

Among them:

--Those 200 wins--95 more than any competitor.

--Seven Winston Cup championships--two more than closest pursuer Dale Earnhardt.

--Seven Daytona 500 victories.

--Forty-one 500-mile wins.

--Twenty-seven wins in a single season (1967).

--Ten wins in a row (1967)

--At least one victory every season for 18 years (1960-1977).

--Purses totaling $6.8 million.

Most of those records will remain unmatched. Petty the person may, too.

During the career that has touched five decades, Richard Petty probably has set some record for kind words spoken about him.

“Richard’s been one of the people who’s brought racing from when it wasn’t a very respectable sport to where it is today,” said Junior Johnson, a top driver in Petty’s younger years and now one of racing’s top team owners. “I think he’s contributed more to the sport than any other individual.

“He’s always had this special quality about being able to work with people, and the manufacturers and the accessory people, that he’s made the sport better for him being in it. And, even though he’s been one of the top people in the history of racing, he’s never let his attitude get out of hand. Through good and bad, he’s always been good, and he’s given to the sport a lot more than he took from it.”

Through all the success--artistic and financial--Petty has remained a man of the people. Not a phony who smiles and signs autographs when the cameras are on or when he feels like being nice, but a true gentleman striving to make time for everyone who wants a piece of him--a truly awesome task.

On a recent race-day morning at Michigan International Speedway, the tall, spare Petty, garbed as usual in feathered cowboy hat, dark glasses and cowboy boots, walked out of the drivers’ meeting in the garage area into a small but enthusiastic crowd.

One well-known driver saw the crush and muttered, “Oh hell,” and quickly sought a different way out.

The King broke into a wide smile and walked directly into the crowd, signing, talking and laughing with the fans as the entire knot moved across the garage area like a small wave.

Petty has signed his autograph so many times--his longtime public relations man, Harvey Duck, reckons the number at more than a million--that you would think he would simply make a couple of squiggles to get it over with.

Not The King. He has developed a flowery script that takes perhaps 10 seconds to complete.

Why does he spend so much time on his signature?

“I did it so that I’d have time with each fan,” he said matter-of-factly. “That way I have time to say something, and so does the fan.”

The love affair lives on, but every story has to have an ending. Petty has decided it is time to step aside, to begin running the Petty Enterprises team from the pits rather than the cockpit.

Petty is only three years older than Harry Gant, who continues to win on the Winston Cup circuit. But The King has not won since July 4, 1984, at Daytona, and he has not even had many top 10 finishes in recent years--none this year and only two since 1988.

He made the decision to finish his driving career by turning the entire 1992 season into a fan appreciation tour.

Sure, Petty has made money from the sale of special souvenirs this season, but he also has scheduled himself so heavily that he says, “I sometimes can’t be sure I’ve put in any time to sleep or eat. I finally just had to start saying ‘No.’ But that’s hard to do. I don’t want to do it.”

Petty said getting in the car and driving remains the fun part of the job, but admits that the failure to remain competitive has eaten away at him.

“The (distractions of the farewell tour) are more than what I would like it to be, but I’ve been distracted for the last four or five years anyway, and at least we’re doing something positive in doing it this way,” he said.

“Before, we were just distracted and weren’t doing either side of it--the promotional end of it or the driving deal--right. Basically, I was trying to keep the situation together and get enough money to run the racing operation.”

By doing that, Petty said, he committed himself to projects that took him away from the car. That will change.

“Hopefully, next year, I’ll have more time to spend with the race car,” he said. “It’s been eight or 10 years since I’ve had any time at all to spend with the race car, and I think it shows on my part. . . .

“Once you get unfocused from racing to something else, racing is so competitive, you can’t have anything else. . . . I’ve just lost my focus. There’s no way I can overcome it, so that was one of the reasons I said, ‘Let’s look at something else.’ ”

Petty isn’t going away. He will remain on the scene as a team owner.

So how hard will it be to stay out of the driver’s seat?

“I still enjoy being in the car and that’s what’s going to be difficult to replace next year,” Petty said. “I don’t know if just being the car owner will do that. . . . Somewhere on down the line I’ll have to replace that particular high that Richard Petty has always had.

“It’s still there when I get in that car. It may not be as intense now as it used to be, because I can’t hold my concentration as long, but it’s still there.”

Now, Richard is an elder statesman of the sport and will have to sit back and watch son Kyle--already a NASCAR star--and perhaps at least one of Kyle’s sons, carry on the family tradition.

Kyle, who is more than a journeyman but less than a superstar in the family’s chosen sport, has his own view of his father’s accomplishments.

“I go out there and compete now and see how hard it is to run up front and to win and I think about what Daddy has accomplished, and it’s awesome,” said the younger Petty, who no longer drives for the family team. “Things were different when Richard Petty started in this sport, but you can’t ignore what he has done. I just know how hard it’s been to win five times in 14 years.

“There is nobody else like Richard Petty. As good as Granddaddy and some of them other guys was, Daddy is one of a kind. We’ll probably never see his equal.”

Petty, who also has taken time to get deeply involved in politics--he was a county selectman for many years--and help wife Linda raise a family with four children, said changes are “a natural part of life.”

“When I first started running, we thought it was a professional sport. But it wasn’t. It was a very regional sport and very low key.

“Now it is a very big major sport. It went from being amateurish to very professional. The cars have changed, the sponsors have changed, there’s so many more people and so many more big racetracks, but the big deal is that that’s what it took to make a professional situation out of it.

“I’ve enjoyed being part of it and I hope I can be part of it for a long time to come.”

Dale Inman, Petty’s cousin and crew chief on 187 of his victories, has been through the changes, too, and knows first hand why stock-car fans have flocked to Petty’s kingdom.

“The changes just go on and on, in equipment, rules, safety, everything, and Richard Petty has seen it all happen,” Inman said. “What other sport has changed that much, and could anybody else have stayed that competitive through all those changes? Richard Petty did.”