On the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, We Interview “The King”
He’s one of the closest things we have to royalty. “The King” Richard Petty has won seven NASCAR championships and a record 200 NASCAR races, but you already know that. On the occasion of his 80th birthday, HOT ROD had an opportunity to sit down with him and talk about his family’s Petty Foundation for giving something back, the Petty Garage, but also about racing—both then and now—with some insight into how he won those record 127 poles and more than 700 top-10 finishes. Bright and casual, with his signature dark glasses and hat that make him look ageless, Petty seems at ease with his stature, but never cocky or impressed with it. When asked how many interviews he’s done, he said so many he wouldn’t even take a guess. He made ours seem like it was a pleasure for him to do. We were told he wanted to do this interview because he doesn’t get much exposure to the hot rod side of racing enthusiasts and is always ready to spread some NASCAR gospel. You knew this was something special when the entire staff was on hand to watch, and to be honest, it was—we’re as much fans as the next person, and Petty did not disappoint. We taped the interview, which can be found on HOT ROD’s YouTube channel. It’s worth a watch.
HRM] Tell us what the Petty Foundation is and what it does?
RP] We started the foundation with all of the Pettys as a family deal, and one of the biggest things we’re doing right now is the Victory Junction Gang for chronically and seriously injured kids. It’s been open 10 to 12 years in Level Cross, North Carolina, on the backside of some property that we own. We’ve seen 27,000 kids that wouldn’t be able to go to a regular camp because of some affliction or something like that, helping them to experience the joy of just being a kid. We also do a bunch of stuff with the Paralyzed Veterans of America, as well as local stuff. We try to make the foundation be worthwhile to our customers and others rather than ourselves.
HRM] You are also involved in Petty’s Garage. How did that come about?
RP] It’s also in Level Cross, right beside the house I grew up in. Part of the Garage is the initial part my dad started in 1949 when he first got into Cup racing, and we just expanded from there. About eight years ago, we moved Petty Enterprises, which was where Petty’s Garage is now, to Moorsville, North Carolina. So we had race cars still sitting there and other stuff, and some of the guys that worked for me a long time didn’t want to make the trip back and forth to Mooresville, so I have the museum and other things that need help and race cars that needed to be upgraded and a bunch of junk I wanted rolling, so we just started in the back where Petty Enterprises was. People come to the museum and saw what we’re doing, and they want a car painted, a bigger engine, or brake upgrades, so the first thing we knew we were in the garage business. We do a lot of everything like restorations—you bring in a box of stuff and we’ll make a car out of it. We do upgrades and fancy paint jobs on new cars. We also do a lot of one-off cars for foundations and organizations to auction off at different automotive events.
HRM] How many employees does Petty’s Garage have?
RP] I think there were 50 there when I left, but I’ve been gone for a couple of weeks.
HRM] The Xfinity Series is coming up at Indy, and they’re going to have restrictor plates. How do you feel about that?
RP] I’ve read a little about it. You know as much as I do, which isn’t much, right? But that’s the wrong way to go. You don’t make racing when you have something that the racers can’t do anything with. You’ve got no power—you can catch somebody when they make a little slip, but when you get on the gas, nothing happens. You’ve got to have some torque somewhere in order to race people, otherwise you’re running the same speed as they do. It doesn’t seem to work at Daytona and Talladega, so I don’t know how they think it’s going to work at Indy because it’s a four-corner racetrack, and you’re going to have to have some acceleration to go into the corner. If you lose the momentum with a restrictor plate, you’re behind three laps before you can catch back up, so I don’t see it working. But they’ll give it a try, I guess.
I always let that guy go lead the race for three to four laps for me to find out what he had.” — Richard Petty
HRM] What’s the answer?
RP] I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re trying to do, because when you look at Indy it’s a terrible place for our kind of cars to race. You can’t change the cars because the track is not suitable for our kind of racing, so just changing the cars I don’t think will work.
HRM] Did you have a routine for each race, and did superstition enter into how you prepared for a race?
RP] [Laughs] You’ve got to remember when I started racing I was working on my own car and I helped the boys take it to the racetrack, and then worked on it while we were at the racetrack, so you had no time for any routine. Then as time progressed the guys got a little more organized and I still worked on the car at the shop, but not the racetrack, but they had the press and they wanted interviews and so I didn’t have time to do anything else. It got to where they wouldn’t let me work on the race car at all, so over a period of time, the systems changed. As far as me driving the race car, I didn’t eat anything special, I didn’t sleep anything special. We used to go to some of those races and we’d be up 28 to 38 hours getting to the track, then working on the car, then coming back home, so it was whatever was in front of you that you had to do. As far as exercise, I felt that if you were busy all of the time, that was enough exercise.
HRM] With respect to pack racing and keeping track of the cars, were you good at that?
RP] Most of the time at Daytona or Talladega, there were five to six cars in a pack and there might be a bunch of them when they’d throw the green flag, but they’d get scattered out. But the ones you really had to race with weren’t but five or six, so you knew where everybody was at all the time. We had no radio communications or spotters—you had to know yourself. You did what you wanted to do, or try to do, or had to do under those circumstances, and there wasn’t anybody telling you what to do and when to do it. I don’t think they had as many crashes back then as they do now because a lot of times when the spotters are in one place and they’re looking at it from a certain angle and they don’t know how fast those cars are going or gaining on each other, if you’re in the car you know. So a lot of times the drivers will blame the spotters when it’s really the driver’s fault.
HRM] So are spotters causing more accidents?
RP] When we first started, the spotters were there to keep you abreast of what was going on in front of you like if there’s a caution flag coming out or a wreck in the first corner, directions to go high—something like that. Then as time progressed, they got more involved and now they’re telling you to turn left, clear, guy coming up, whatever, and I have not driven under those circumstances, so it would probably confuse me to do it now. If that’s how I learned, then it would be OK, but I didn’t learn that way, so it would be confusing.
That still bugs me that me and Pearson wound up running into each other.” — Richard Petty
HRM] You once said you should have quit racing five to seven years sooner than you did. What was different about those last few years?
RP] The big deal was that when I decided to quit, I started looking back. Equipment-wise with Petty Enterprises, and with the way I drove the car, if I had quit in 1984 or 1985 then I wouldn’t have had those six to seven years where Petty Enterprises was kind of going downhill sponsorship-wise. Plus, at that time, you had people like Penske, Roush, and Hendricks that were bringing in monetary deals like ad sponsors from outside, because they could wheel and deal. When we were running, you had Petty Enterprises, Woods boys, Bud Moore, Junior Johnson—we would go out and try to get sponsorships. We’d say, “Hey, here’s our record, here’s what we’re winning,” but we couldn’t get the attention or have situations to put the pressure on the sponsor. With a Hendricks, you go into DuPont and say, “I want $20 million for my race car,” and they say, “What are you going to give back?” Well, [Hendricks] had 100 dealers and every one of those shops will have DuPont stuff, so it was a no-brainer for them. We didn’t have that kind of operation, so I was going downhill, but my car was going downhill also. Age caught up with me and I got more cautious. But the big deal and the reason I stayed as long as I did was that driving a race car was my hobby—it wasn’t work. When I got in that car, I would turn the radio off and I was by myself. I did my own thing, so I really enjoyed it, and I had to change some things when I got out. It just took a long time to give up my hobby, I’ll put it that way.
HRM] So do you still want to drive?
RP] You know, sometimes when I get up on the truck and I can see these guys running, I think, “What are they doing? Don’t they know better than that?” Then about that time you see one come in on the end of the wrecker and you say, “That’s the reason I’m not out there.”
HRM] You’ve been quoted saying, “He’s a good driver, but not a good racer.” What does that mean?
RP] OK, when we started racing and there were 40 drivers out there, 40 are pretty good drivers or they wouldn’t have made it there. So then we take those drivers and say, “OK, who knows how to race?” A lot of people can get around a racetrack by themselves and maybe do a better job than the guy that wins the race. But knowing how to race and who to race with, those guys stay out of trouble and they wind up winning races. At any given time in NASCAR—30 years ago, 10 years ago, now—there’s only six of them that I look at that are racers, and the racers end up winning races. Good drivers and the ones that sit on poles and run fast laps during the race, they’re good drivers, but not a lot of them win races.
HRM] Who’s a good racer today?
RP] Jeff Gordon was a good racer—he knew how to race. Jimmy Johnson is a pretty dag gum good racer. The Busch boys, they’re not too bad, either. They’ve been there and done that and they know what they’re doing. The deal is now we’re getting a new crop of people coming in and there’s about five to six guys that are taking a bunch of Jeff’s deal and a bunch of other guys, too, so there’s a new crowd coming in. They have not been there long enough for me to make a decision as to who is a good racer and who is not because most of these guys coming in have got cars that are capable of winning races, if they are good drivers and there’s good situations. So it’s going to be basically two to three years with the new guys. Even though one might go out and win three or four races, he’s going to have to do it over a period of time for me to look at him and say this guy is a real good racer. In the past, you look back and see some guys that have won four or five races one year and never won anything before and never won anything since then. That’s the way things work
HRM] Who was a good racer when you were racing?
RP] Well, I thought all of them were good. [David] Pearson, he was always right there. Bobby Allison was always right there. Cale Yarborough was always there. They were the people that you really had to race with because they were racers. A lot of times, you had some other guys that came in and they’d race with you for a few laps and maybe they’d wind up winning a race, but the next race you didn’t know where they were at. These guys were consistent year in and year out—won big races, won championships, little races at small tracks, big tracks, road courses. Those are the people to me that had plain raw talent and knew how to win races.
HRM] Did you have a strategy for the race?
RP] Every race I ever drove, I drove because of the circumstances. What were they giving me, what was I giving them. Every race was different, whether we ran 20 races or 40 a year, it didn’t matter. Your competition is a little different. Some days you’re better than you were last week, but somebody else is a little better—and you know that before the race starts. And sometimes they are way better than you are, and then you have to sit down and say, “OK, how do we figure out how to beat these people?” Then other times you are a lot better than they are and you say, “OK, how do I keep this thing together for the whole race because the car is capable of winning the race?” So I don’t think I ever sat down and really had a strategy going into a race. I know a lot of times one of my deals was if I sat on the pole or outside pole and a guy would be beside me, I always let that guy go lead the race for three to four laps for me to find out what he had. Once I found out what he had, sometimes he’d run off and leave me, but most of the time if I found out what he had, then I knew how to race him and was able to beat him.
HRM] If you could go back to one race, which one would that be?
RP] Probably the 1976 Daytona 500. That still bugs me that me and Pearson wound up running into each other—or I ran into him, he said, or he ran into me, as far as I’m concerned. That could have been prevented if you knew that was the way it was going to wind up. I got into the same situation in 1984 when we won the 200th race against Cale—exactly the same situation. Yarborough passes me up the backstretch, but the deal was, as I went into the corner to go in and cut under him, OK?
HRM] Did you have 1976 in mind when that happened?
RP] No, it just came up and I knew what mistakes—and I’ll call them mistakes because I got beat, I knew what the circumstances were and what the situation could be. The deal with Cale was I didn’t clear Cale, but I thought I had cleared Pearson. If I knew what was going on in 1976, then I would have had a better chance to win it. With the next race, it wound up I got up beside Cale and it was just a deal of who gets to the start/finish line. The cars were pretty even because of the aero drag on both of them, so being that I was on the inside and we went through the dogleg, it was just a shorter distance by about this far from one grove to another, and that’s how much I beat him.
HRM] This NASCAR season with the race stages and postseason, how do you feel about all of these changes and breaks?
RP] I guess I look at it that you wave the green flag and race until it’s over. The deal of having a couple of breaks like quarters or halftimes in a football game, I can live with that because that gives me a chance to adjust my car or do some other stuff because I know how far I can run, and I can get a strategy for how far my gas gets me and how my tires are doing, and then we can sit down and not have to make a pit stop for adjustments. As far as giving points and stuff, I can’t keep up with it. I don’t think the fans can keep up with it. Who ran third in the first segment, or who was 10th in the second segment, or who won it. When you really get down to the end of the thing, it’s confusing. But the guys that have the best season, they are going to win the championship, and they’ll be up front no matter what—I don’t care how you count them or how you run the thing, the cream rises to the top. That’s what’s going to happen, no matter how they count everything. To me it seems like it must be confusing for the fans, and maybe over a period of time I’ll even learn them. It doesn’t change the field at all, it just changes the positions when you make a pit stop, and it puts cars closer together. Basically, it’s not a bad deal from the TV’s standpoint because we get to see more green-flag laps now. Most times when you’re watching TV, just as the commercial comes on, something exciting happens. They’re trying to eliminate that and put all of the commercials close together so we have more time for the racing. From that point, it’s a good strategy.
Fast Facts
Won a record 200 NASCAR races.
Won a record 127 NASCAR poles.
Has a record of more than 700 top-10 NASCAR finishes.
His father, Lee, was a three-time NASCAR champion.
Won the NASCAR championship seven times.
Has lived his entire life in Level Cross, North Carolina.
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