From the S&S archives:
The winning ways of the Petty Blue

In 19 years of Grand National NASCAR auto racing, Richard Petty has won so many races that you couldn't blame him if he got bored with it once in a while.

But there's less chance of that than him coming in last in a race. He eats and sleeps racing. He is not the kind of driver who sees the car on race day or shortly before.

After a race when he returns home to Level Cross, a crossroads community in the rolling hills of central North Carolina near Randleman, he spends a good part of his time overseeing the work that's done on his cars at Petty Enterprises, a huge race-car engineering facility that has grown over the years with the Petty family's good fortunes at racing.

The business is a juggernaut of engineering talent that takes the well-known "Petty Blue" cars apart to the last nut and bolt after races, checking them throughly and putting them back together for the next race.

This attention to detail has paid off big for Petty. With 186 victories behind him, he is the winningest racer in the history of Grand National racing. And some years his track feats border on the unbelievable. In 1967 he won 27 of 48 races, 10 of the victories coming consecutively. In 1971 he won 21 of 46 races.

Petty has earned well over $2 million driving number "43" across the finish first. Last year, when he finished second overall to Cale Yarborough, his winnings amounted to $318,425.

As large as the winnings seem, they are not enough to keep Petty Enterprises in the black. Brother Bill Frazier, a former racing circuit preacher who is now in charge of promotions for Petty, says, "Without our main sponsor STP and Gabriel Shocks we'd operate in the red."

Petty has been called the "Babe Ruth of Grand National racing" and it doesn't look like there's a Roger Marls on the horizon. But Petty thinks younger drivers like Darrell Waltrip have the potential.

But there are other things to consider like "circumstances." Petty will tell you that he came along at the right time.

He likes to quote his father, Lee, a champion stock car driver himself : "No matter how hard you work or what happens, you'll overcome EVER' THING (pausing for emphasis, then continuing) but circumstances. You cannot control circumstances." He says this in an easy rural North Carolina drawl that is unchanged by his wide travels as a race driver.

"I can control how good I do with my car, how fast I go but if somebody throws a beer can on the track and I run into that, I can't control that. Or if I get a bad tire or someone spins out in front of me, I can't control that."

But circumstances over the years have favored Petty beyond all expectation. His closest rival in victories is David Pearson with 99. And another Petty, Lee, is third with 54 and he hasn't raced since 1961.

If Petty's a driving genius, his career hasn't been an overnight success story. His 19 years of race driving tell only part of the story. He and his brother Maurice, who is now his chief mechanic and considered one of the best engine men in racing, began following their dad to races in the late 1940s before they were teenagers.

They grew up with racing and the family has become to stock car racing what the DiMaggios were to baseball or the Kennedys to politics.

Mention NASCAR racing and Petty's name comes up almost immediately. He is called "The King" or the superstar of the superspeedways, but he has never let that sort of reverence influence his personality. He's outwardly easy-going but maybe the fact that he's been hospitalized for an ulcer indicates an inner storm.

But he blames it on improper diet — going to a race and having maybe a soft drink and a pack of Nabs. He's careful about what he eats now and he says his troubles are over. It's not uncommon for him to drink milk during a pit stop nowadays.

At 6-feet-2 and 190 pounds he's nearly 20 pounds lighter than when he played football at Randleman High School. But the Petty smile is the same — two rows of straight white teeth, the kind that would put dentists out of business if enough people had them.

He has worked hard to give stock car racing, a sport that has its origins in liquor running, a good image. And he's never left it for other kinds of racing except for one brief stint at drag racing. NASCAR racing suits him. He is a clean liver, a family man with four children, who attends church regularly. He is popular among drivers and has won the "Most Popular Driver" award several times.

He was talking about racing safety in his walnut-paneled office at Level Cross while smoking a thin cigar.

"I'll always be safety minded because I'm a driver," he was saying. He speaks with boyish exuberance in a mellow baritone that suggested hot biscuits and molasses and maybe black-eyed peas and ham. "If I had always worked on a car for someone else it might have been different."

Safety is something he has pursued with the same fervor that Jackie Stewart did on the Grand Prix circuit. When you consider that he has driven at speeds of more than 140 miles an hour — often at 200 m.p.h. — for more than 100,000 miles you might expect expressions of surprise that he's still alive. But if you've driven that distance and gotten progressively faster, make that quicker (a distinction Petty's careful to make), and never gotten anything worse than a separated shoulder and some pulled rib muscles, then logically the question might be: from which fountain flows this abundance of luck? But racing has grown much safer, he says.

"Running at 180 miles an hour is a lot safer than it used to be at 140. And cars, tires and tracks are better. Suspension is better and emergency crews are better."

Over the years he has been very much a part of the safety revolution. His father was the first to put a roll bar in a stock car because he felt his hard-top Dodge was unsafe. And during his and his father's racing career Petty has seen the single roll bar grow into a protective cage made of more than 250 feet of tubular steel that almost guarantees that he'll go through most collisions without serious injury. Lap seat belts have grown into full harnesses. A whole new technology of tires and suspension has been developed.

Lessons on safety are sometimes learned the hard way and the Pettys have had some spectacular accidents. Lee was nearly killed at Daytona in 1961 when Johnny Beauchamp's car plowed into his and they went through the fence at 150 miles an hour.

Then Richard's Plymouth went out of control at Darlington in 1970, overturning three or four times on the track. He escaped with a separated shoulder but window nets on the driver's side became mandatory after that.

"The NASCAR racers that we run now are the safest of any racers anywhere in the world," Petty says. " Formula 1, I guess, would be the worst."

Petty has won six Grand National championships, the latest in 1975. If his performance seems a bit off in the last couple of years, he lays it to circumstances. Going into his 20th season of racing he is optimistic.

After four years with a Dodge Charger, which he drove for the last time at Riverside in January and didn't complete the race, he is changing to a 1978 Dodge Magnum which he and his crew have been readying for several months. He will go out to do battle with it at the Daytona 500 on Feb. 19.

But understand now, the Magnum won't be all that new. Basically, the newness only goes skin deep. Everything under it — chassis and engine — is Petty tried and true.

"We'll run the same engine we've run for the last three years," Petty says. "We've got some different manifolds and we've been working on some heads and stuff. We try to keep improving the thing all the time."

But when Petty talks of improving an engine he's primarily concerned with its durability. In a 500-mile race it Is the engine that's still running well in the last part of the race that has put him in a position to win so often.

Concerning speed he says: "We got to the speed plateau in 1970. We were using 427-cubic-inch engines, cars with slick bodies and we were running 200 miles an hour ... When you're running that fast it's all you can do to hold your car on the track.

"NASCAR tries to regulate it so it'll be a good show. They don't want it to be the kind of a deal where the cat with the faster car will run off and leave everybody. You'll see a better race at 180 miles an hour than at 200 because the cars are more controllable and they can run closer together. More crews can build a car that will go 180 and people in the stands can't tell the difference in the speed. We went from 200 miles an hour at Talladega back to 180 and the races were a lot better."

NASCAR brought the speed down by putting rigid restrictions on engines. The standard right now is a 358-cubic-inch engine but Petty thinks it will drop to 305 in the next couple of years.

"One reason I'm leaning that way is the cars are getting smaller and when cars get smaller they get faster. To combat that we've got to have a smaller engine."

Petty has always placed strong emphasis on handling characteristics and it is this that has often enabled him to defeat faster cars. It goes to the core of his racing philosophy which is: It's not the fastest car but the quickest car that wins.

He explains it this way:

"People are always talking about fast cars, howling cars and all that kind of stuff. But it is not how fast you run, but how quick. What I'm saying is that you've got a starting line and no matter how fast you run down that straightaway, what counts is how fast you get back to that line. That's not fastness, that's quickness."

It is this quickness that has enabled Petty to compete with faster cars. He has relied heavily also on drafting — a widely used maneuver where one car runs close behind another and is pulled along by it.

"Drafting is the big thing in NASCAR racing and it equalizes a lot of speed. Our cars handle as good as or better than the competition. So if they can run fast, I can hang on to them. There is no way they can sheerly run away from me. They have the ability to outrun me but they can't always get away from me because my car handles well enough so I made up the difference in the corners.

"That's one of the reasons we've. always liked Chrysler's torsion-bar suspension. With it we've been able to set our cars up on most tracks where they handle as good as or better than the competition.

"The chassis is still very important ... On most race tracks I still feel like I have an advantage in the corners. It's the kind of a deal where you're not going to be the best handling car at all the race tracks no matter what. There's always going to be one or two that handle as good as or better than you but day in and day out I feel like we've got the best handling car.

"My cousin Dale Inman works on the chassis and he understands it better than I do. We keep a record of what we run and what the setup for the car is and when we come home after a race while it's still fresh in our minds we say: 'Okay, if we went back tomorrow, what would we do to make the car a little better?' We make notes and file them and when we get ready to race again we pull them out and look at 'em."

When Petty began racing in 1958 at age 21, Lee gave him a bit of advice that he has always tried to follow: "Only drive as fast as the car feels good."

At the same time he has partly patterned his style of driving after that of his dad and the likes of Tim Flock and Jim Pascal, all smooth, quick and efficient winning drivers.

"I was just a boy when I watched them but it didn't take a genius to see who was winning the races. Some of the drivers really put on a show raw-dogging it, spinning out in the turns but the drivers who were winning were the smooth ones that you might not have noticed all that much until the finish."

Besides that you have to have the talent and the will to win, Petty says, and adds: "You've either got it or you haven't. If you've got it, you tune it. It's off the seat of your britches is really what it's all about."

He feels that the passing years have not yet taken their toll.

"When I first started driving, I didn't have the experience, naturally,, so I drove to the ragged limit on what my physical skills were. Now I drive to the ragged limit on what my mental skills are because of the experience I've accumulated.

"In other words, I'm not near as reckless or gung-ho as when I was younger but I run a lot better race, a lot faster race just because of the experience. I can do things today that I don't even think about where 10 years ago I might have thought: maybe I can and maybe I can't but I'll do it anyway. Now I can do it because I've had the experience.

"In the stands you might say: 'Look at that crazy driver!'

"But I've done it so much, it's not even taking a chance. It's that way with all experienced drivers. I'm not any better than a lot of race-car drivers but the deal is I've got the experience. When you run day in and day out the experience is going to beat the man who doesn't have it.

"My reflexes today can't be as good as they were 10 years ago. But my anticipation of what is going to happen because of the experience is so much better that I can't tell if I've lost any of my reflexes. As far as driving that race car and getting in close situations, I can get in closer situations now than I could then because I can anticipate a lot better. And I'm not the only one. All the drivers do."

On his record since 1975, when he won 13 races, he says:

"The last couple of years I haven't won the races ... but I can't say that I've gone downhill. I didn't win but three in '76 and then five last year but I mean if I'm losing, it's going to be a little at a time and it's going to take more than one or two years before you'll be able to tell it."

He calls competition a relative thing:

"Competition to you or anybody else is just according to how good you do. In other words, if I do super good, it doesn't make any difference about the competition. They're going to look bad. But if I'm having a lot of trouble like I've had in the last couple of years — just things not working out, not getting the breaks — then it looks like my competition is gaining on me.

"I think the reason we're not doing better is not because of what the competition is doing but what we're doing. They're not putting pressure on me and making me make mistakes, or making the crew make mistakes. It's like these football teams. They go along for two or three years and they can't be beat. Then in the next two or three years they haven't changed the players or anything but they can't do anything right."

Petty has said he's never known fear on the track and he vows that if he ever does, he'll quit. But anger?

"Sure but you'd better not let it last long or you get in trouble. It used to really be bad when we run on the short tracks but it's gotten to be such a professional deal now and there's so much money involved, you can't let your emotions overrun your common sense."

He says he doesn't have a favorite track but he's won more than a dozen times at Martinsville, Va., and he likes to go there. There are several he doesn't like. He calls Talladega a freaky place and he's not overly fond of Bristol or Nashville.

"So many things have happened at Talladega that don't happen anywhere else. One of the boy's mother got killed by a car in the infield there, one of the crew chiefs had a heart attack and one got run over in the pits and got his legs cut off. I had a brother-in-law that got killed in the pits. There have been two or three boys killed on the track there and there have been shootings in the infield. It don't happen at other places ...

"Bristol is a half-mile track with a 33-degree bank. It's like running" around the walls of this room. If anything happens in front of you, you're in a wreck, It's physically inhuman even to run the thing because you can run as hard as you can for the first 50 laps, then the rest of the time you're hanging on."

Petty is often asked how he has managed to win so often and he answers simply: "I don't know." Then after a pause for thought, he asks: "Why was Elvis Presley the best singer? Was he or wasn't he? He was at the right place at the right time with the right talent and with the right people behind him. The same for me."

Petty isn't giving much thought yet to when he'll stop racing. He likes to point out that many of the top drivers in the country are about his age — either in their late 30s or early 40s.

And racing is still fun for him — more so in recent years.

"In the last three off four years it has gotten to be more fun because I know that one of these days I'm going to have to quit doing it. There aren't as many years in front of me as there are behind me so I'm going to enjoy it while I'm doing it."