Hail to the King

By Ron Lemaster Jr.

03/08

The simple white house on U.S. 220 is like many others near Level Cross, N.C. It's unassuming, set back from the road a ways, with brilliant white fencing all around. The difference lies in who was born and raised there, and the buildings that surround the house on two sides.

Richard Petty, king of NASCAR racing, and his brother Maurice were born in the house and spent many years on the family land, carving out a living at first and then coming to dominate the sport like no other team before or since. Just a few steps away from the back porch of that house sits an A-frame garage that once housed Lee Petty's race cars. The concrete floor of that garage was poured by Richard and Maurice and their cousin, Dale Inman, while Lee was off racing. Up to then, the Petty cars were prepared on the dirt floor of that garage. Tailgater Monthly went to Level Cross, to the seat of the Petty power, to talk to Richard Petty about the history of the place, the team's winter move to Mooresville and where Petty Enterprises fits in today's version of the sport he once ruled.

Q This is the seat of the Petty power. Is it going to be weird driving into another shop?
A It changes around. I'm big on football and stuff, and if you look back, everybody tried to keep up with Green Bay, and the first thing you know, Green Bay got left by the wayside. Now Green Bay is getting their stuff back together, and they're among the leaders now. When we started, my dad was right at the top of the heap with me all these years and we stayed close to the top, and then we went off the hill and down in the valley. Now we're trying to get back on the hill, like the Yankees did and Green Bay. That's one of the reasons for the move. It's like, 'OK guys, we've about used up our usefulness here, and we've got to go where some of the other stuff is happening.'

Q How far, realistically, are you from being back on top of that hill?
A You don't know, because no matter what you do, it's what other people do also. If they stay still for a year or two and not continue to go, it wouldn't take you long to catch up with that. But you catch up one step and that guy's gone a half-step forward, so you've got a lot farther to go than he has and it takes a lot longer to get there because it took him a long time to get there, whoever it might be, Hendrick or Roush or whoever. They didn't come in and blow everyone away either. It took them years and years and years and a lot of money and people to put them in the position they're in. If we go forward, we've got to start climbing that hill. Every step they take, we have to take two, especially if you're trying to get ahead of them, which is what we're trying to do.

Q Daytona has to be a special place for you, with seven 500 victories. Is there a particular race there that stands out above all the others?
A It's really hard to say. If you hadn't won but one or two, yeah, but we've been fortunate. I won seven, Pete Hamilton won one for us and Daddy won the first one, so the first one was a very big deal. When I came back in '64 and won the race, that was the first time Chrysler had the hemi, and we were pretty much the dominant car. That was the first Superspeedway victory for me. I'd won a bunch of races, on shorter tracks and road courses, but we'd never had an engine that could carry us at Daytona, even though I think I ran second a couple of times in a drafting situation, so that was a big deal. We didn't get to run in '65, and then we got to come back in 1966 with a smaller engine and still won the race. That was kind of a catch-up deal. We won three or four races in the '70s, and we won the '79 race because somebody else made mistakes. In '81, we kind of out-figured them. We had a good car, not a winning car, but we still won the race. There were two or three races in there where we had the dominant car, but something happened and we didn't win, so it kind of evened itself out. I suppose that to win seven races, and a couple three might have been given to me, but there were two or three that circumstances lost the race for us, so it evened itself out.