Liz Clarke - One Helluva Ride: How NASCAR Swept the Nation

CONTENTS

To the worlds best parents, with love and gratitude

FOREWORD

Richard Petty, seven-time NASCAR champion

I ve been going to stock-car races since I was eleven years old. First with my dad, Lee Petty, who won three championships in the 1950s, then as a driver myself, for thirty-five years. And since 1992, as a car owner. And the more Ive watched, the more I see that every race is different. From the very first race they had to the very last race, the only thing thats the same is that they throw the green flag when it starts, and they throw the checkered flag when its over.

The magic part of racing is that you get all the sports in one. And everyone can relate to it. You might not play football or baseball or basketball, or you might not golfbut everyone drives a car. And people are car nuts, even if they have just a plain old sedan. Another good thing about racing is you really dont have to understand the rules. A five-year-old can watch a race, and a 105-year-old can watch it. Even if theyve never seen it before, they can understand whats going on: cars are passing cars, cars are crashing.

When NASCAR first got started, the cars were the drawing card. No one had ever heard tell of Lee Petty or Fireball Roberts or Junior Johnson. People came to watch the Fords and the Chevrolets and the Chryslers run. But they got caught up in the excitement of the wrecks, the competition, and the strategy. And over a period of time, the drivers started bringing people in just because of their namesJunior Johnson, Lee Petty, Curtis Turner. Its sort of like if youre a Green Bay Packers fan, you want Green Bay to win the game. But you go to watch Brett Favre throw touchdown passes.

I think the majority of people can relate to NASCAR drivers better than they can to other pro athletes because most drivers made it happen for themselves. People can relate to some guy who started running on a quarter-mile track in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. Fans read about his life story and say, I know somebody like him. To the general public, racecar drivers are more humanjust plain old guys who just happen to drive racecars.

Thats what I was, a twenty-one-year-old kid, when I ran in the first Daytona 500 in 1959. Id never been to a track that bigtwo and a half miles aroundor seen anything like that. It was very impressive. We didnt have any tests at the track before the drivers went down for the race. The first time we took the cars out for practice that week, the flag man told us to just run three or four laps on the flat part of the track. He didnt want us up on the high banks yet because no one was sure what would happen. I went out and ran through Turns 1 and 2 on the flat. I ran through 3 and 4 on the flat. It was no big deal. So I went up on the bank and got black-flagged, which made me the first guy to get black-flagged at Daytona. Nothing scares you when youre twenty-one!

Over the years I drove just about every kind of car, but they all had to perform. The car had to have a decent engine. It had to handle well. It had to have a decent pit crew. Theres no I in racing, for sure. Its more of a team sport than the average fan thinks. The driver is just the quarterback. And the greatest quarterback in the world is nothing if he doesnt have someone to throw the ball to or handoff to.

I never really realized the impact of the 1979 Daytona 500, my sixth win in the race, until much later because I was so caught up in running the race. But it was on national television, flag to flag, for the first time. They had a big snowstorm up and down the East Coast, so a lot of people that wouldnt normally tune in were watching. And it was a heck of a race. I was doing all I could to run for third, but then Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough, who were leading, crashed on the last lap. Fate stepped in and took us from third to first without us doing anything.

NASCAR was a southern sport up until the late-1980s, even though we wandered up north and out to California from time to time. The sponsors are as responsible as anyone for taking us to new markets, like Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I wish I could have run the inaugural Brickyard 400 in 1994, but I had retired two years earlier. That was a big feather in NASCARs cap. When we went to Indy, it made us legitimate. Television looked at us different. The sponsors looked at us different. And everyone said, You finally made it.

I just loved racing so much that I never thought about not doing it. I guess that was the reason it was so hard for me to retire, even though I knew I needed to get out of the car for the business side of the deal. I knew I wasnt up to winning races and doing what I had done before. But I just loved to drive a racecar. I just loved being out there and trying to beat somebody.

It doesnt feel like that was fifteen years ago. But just by watching the races since then, Ive learned so much.

When youre in the car, you cant see the forest for the trees because youre right in the middle of it. But if you stand back and look, you get a different perspective. Each driver has a trait you probably wouldnt have known if you had been out there racing with him. But after you watch race after race, you understand their philosophy. You understand how they lap cars, how they race cars, how they act and react under adverse circumstances, how they act when theyre ahead, how they get through traffic. You can see their strategy and a bunch of different things I never thought about when I was driving.

If someone who has never been to a NASCAR race is going for the first time, I tell them to get the best seat in the house, right at the startfinish line, just as high up as they can get. The higher up you are, the more you can see. And if youve got someone to pull for, it always makes it easer to watch.

We used to have a lot of fans, kids mainly, just because the No. 43 car was so bright. They didnt know Richard Petty from Adams housecat, but they could pick out the blue-and-red car anywhere. It was easy for them to follow, so they pulled for that bright car.

But if you just go to a race and dont know any drivers, just pick out a car and follow it and see how things develop. By the time you come back a second or third time, youll have picked out your favorite place to sit. And youll have picked out a favorite driver. And maybe youll still be watching fifty years from now.

Back when I ran that first Daytona 500, I didnt even know what fifty years was. I was just thinking about next week. I never envisioned the world being this big. I never envisioned 300 million people living in the United States, either. Not in 1959! But fifty years from now, NASCAR just might still be racing. If theres still an automobile, I suspect it will.

INTRODUCTION

M y first mistake was wearing a dress. Dresses, I learned, werent allowed in the NASCAR garage unless modeled by Miss Winston, Miss Mopar, Miss Mello-Yello, or whatever honorary beauty queen reigned that day, replete with tiara and satin sash across an ample bosom. But for women not born to ride atop floats, wearing a dress meant you didnt get in.

It was the first item on a long list of things I didnt know about stock-car racing when I was sent to cover my first NASCAR practice in 1991.