A history of winning with Richard Petty: You Kids Don't Know | NASCAR on FOX

[MUSIC PLAYING] BOB POCKRASS: To hear Richard Petty describe it, he lives on the family farm. But this rural farm looks a little bit different, smells a little bit different, sounds a little bit different than the others in Level Cross, North Carolina. The Petty farm certainly produced an unusual crop, winners. Winners that sprouted rows and rows of trophies thanks to hundreds of victories and a silo full of Cup championships. You know, we got a big farm here, and we just in the racing business, we're not in the farming business. We don't grow corn or tobacco, you know, whatever. We grow racecars. [LAUGHS] And so basically, the family's just been a family farm with cars. The soil of this family farm, you could argue, helped create the fabric for NASCAR as a modern-day sport. COMMENTATOR: --about 130 miles an hour for the average running car. And there's the checkered flag for Richard Petty, the winner of the Sixth Annual Daytona 500. [MUSIC PLAYING] N/A COMMENTATOR: Richard Petty, winner of the Daytona 500 and a thinking driver. N/A The Petty family celebrates 75 years in auto racing in 2024. That's a long time to talk about memories and history. We'll try to tell you some things you kids don't know about the Pettys. Believe it or not, contrary to popular belief, Richard Petty didn't emerge out of the womb born into motorsports. He didn't know squat about racing until 11 years old when his father, Lee, entered his first race. [LAUGHS] And it didn't really go all that well. I'll let the King, Richard Petty himself, explain. At 11 years old, I didn't even know what racing was, OK? So the very first race I ever seen was going to Charlotte, and I really don't remember that much about it except that my dad turned [LAUGHS] the car over about halfway through the race, and we had them come home-- ride home with my uncle because we drove the race car-- they were strictly stock cars, and we drove the race car to the racetrack. BOB POCKRASS: You would think having to hitch their way home would discourage them from totaling another car. But Lee Petty had other ideas. Now, you kids might think of the Pettys as racers who just wanted to race and go fast, but to hear Petty tell it, they didn't race just to race. They raced for the same reason people spend hours in the fields of their farm. You know, once my dad got to looking at it, we got back home, and he got to thinking. And I think they paid $1,500 to win the race. And so he went out and said, OK, I can make a living doing this. So he went out and bought a '49 Plymouth Business Coupe for $990 or something like that. So he figured if, you know, if I can win races or run good, then we can pay for the car and we can make a living at it. So basically, he was the first professional, I guess, that looked at racing and said, I can make a living for my family by driving a race car. [MUSIC PLAYING] BOB POCKRASS: Lee Petty won the seventh race in NASCAR history in 1949. He would win 54 in his career. He's in the Hall of Fame. His son, Richard Petty, the King, won 200 races in his NASCAR career, the first in 1960 and the last in 1984. He's not just in the Hall of Fame. He earned a spot in the inaugural five-member class in 2010. Richard's second cousin, Dale Inman, he, too, has a spot in the NASCAR Hall of Fame. He's the first crew chief inducted and winner of eight Cup championships, seven with Richard Petty and one with Terry Labonte. Richard's brother, Maurice Petty, commonly referred to as Chief, joined the family in the Hall of Fame in 2014 as the first engine builder enshrined. You get the picture. But by the way, Lee Petty, he did have a farm, according to grandson Kyle. It all started with my grandfather, and my grandfather started late in life. OK? You got-- you got to go back. He was 36, 37, 38 before he started driving. That's when NASCAR was formed. They had tried racing before, some outlaw stuff, but they weren't very good at it and didn't do very well. He had raised pigs. He had raised tomatoes. He had raised a little bit of everything, coming out of the Depression, coming out of World War I, living in rural North Carolina. All of a sudden, there was NASCAR, and there was an opportunity to put food on the table. They ran some races. They did pretty good, and it was from-- the rest is history, as they say, I guess. BOB POCKRASS: The Pettys have played a pivotal role in virtually every major event in NASCAR history. Lee Petty won the first Daytona 500, and I bet you kids don't know, that really didn't rank as a big deal to the Pettys at the time. My dad had won two championships, and then going into '59, we were in Daytona, which was the first Daytona race on the 2 and 1/2 mile new speedway. And it wasn't that big a deal at that particular time. It was just another race track that nobody had ever seen. You know, it was run 140 mile an hour. We didn't understand that kind of speed. And my dad was lucky enough to wind up winning the race. And he also won the championship that year. BOB POCKRASS: Another unexpected Daytona story, Kyle winning an ARCA race there in 1979. And believe it or not, Kyle Petty had never driven a race car before that ARCA car at Daytona. Kyle Petty didn't toil on short tracks around the Southeast, and he never just drove the race cars around level cross to see if he could do it. Kyle says he thinks they didn't let him in a car because they knew he would never get out. So his dad never even let him crank the engine. But when Richard Petty had a Dodge Magnum that didn't race well for him in NASCAR's top circuit, he figured it could work for the minor league ARCA series and serve as the perfect way for his son Kyle to enter the sport, and at, of all places, Daytona. The King conducted a short driving lesson at Daytona prior to Kyle driving it at a test himself. My dad took us out, and took me out, and took me around the racetrack in it. He rode in the seat strapped in with a helmet on. I rode in the floorboard just barely hanging on for my life. We run about 192 or 3, and he showed me how to get around Daytona. BOB POCKRASS: Kyle had an up and down Cup career with eight victories in 829 starts. Many believe the true, pure racing talent possibly skipped a generation and went to Kyle's son, Adam. Adam Petty had all the characteristics of a star in the making, charismatic, talented, and a famous last name. His death at age 19 from injuries suffered in a crash in Busch Series practice in May 2000 at New Hampshire devastated the family, but did not end the Petty involvement in the sport. Adam's death and Adam's accident was an endpoint for where we were from a driver's line. But I never saw it as an endpoint for where we were as our family in the sport. As I said before, I grew up at a time in the sport in the '60s when you would go to the racetrack, and you'd be playing with kids in the infield, and their mom would come get them, and you wouldn't see them again. You may never see them again because their father had been killed racing. Death was a part of the sport in the '60s. Death was a part of the sport in the early '70s. It's just something that, in a callous way, is just something that you lived with as part of the sport. BOB POCKRASS: Kyle Petty last competed in 2008. So it's been 16 years since a Petty entered a Cup race. Another Petty grandson, Thad Moffitt, has driven in the truck series as a rookie this year. Several family members have worked on the race teams in front office or other important administrative roles, either at the shops or at the Victory Junction Gang Camp for Children built in Adam's memory. The Petty organization has evolved throughout the last 75 years, and like any business, they would have their disagreements among family members. It never transferred over to Christmas. It never transferred over to birthday. You could be standing in the shop going toe to toe arguing about something and that night having birthday cake and ice cream at somebody's birthday party. That's just the way it was. And they were really good at that. They were really good at separating that. What originated as Lee Petty Engineering and then turned into Petty Enterprises ceased to exist after the 2008 season when it merged with Gillett Evernham Motorsports. It raced under the Richard Petty Motorsports banner with George Gillett and then Andrew Murstein as an owner. And then starting in 2022, it merged into Petty GMS Motorsports. Richard Petty now serves as an ambassador but has no ownership in Legacy Motor Club, co-owned by another seven-time Cup champion, Jimmy Johnson, who bought into Petty GMS prior to the 2023 season. But back at the old shop in Level Cross, the Pettys and their own employees still work on cars, mostly muscle cars, and they operate a small museum. The house where Richard was born in, it remains just a stone's throw away. For all their racing prowess, the Pettys just couldn't keep up with sponsorship and had no outside companies that could create business to business elements for sponsors the way Roger Penske or Rick Hendrick could with a truck leasing operation or auto dealerships. The Pettys thrived in racing at a time when teams built everything in the cars instead of buying pieces from vendors and employing loads of engineers to develop parts and setups. I'll tell you the same thing what Kyle Petty said. That same thing about racing that's always been is they throw the green flag when it starts, checkered flag when it's over. Everything else is completely different. KYLE PETTY: We are a little bit more on the peripheral of the sport. You're not that guy in the car. You're not that guy that owns 100% of the team. You're not that guy changing the direction and driving the sport. I do TV and I talk about it, and I do that kind of stuff. But it's not the position we were in 1949. It's not the position we were in '59, or '69, or '79. And it's not going to be the position we're at in 2029. But to still be able to touch the sport and still be able to put a fingerprint on the sport is cool. Kyle Petty uses the farming analogy to explain why the family has remained in the sport for 75 years. The story sounds familiar to those accustomed to rural life, but something you kids might not know. And I knew families who the price of tobacco dropped, and they couldn't make a living, or the price of milk went down, and they were struggling to get by. You had bad times. Everybody had bad times. But they didn't stop farming. They didn't quit doing what they were doing. They continued to do what they were doing. And that's us. BOB POCKRASS: They continued and persevered. Richard Petty remains one of the most recognizable people in the United States, although many of those under 40 might know him as a voice in the movie "Cars." They know him from the hat he always wears. We know the color blue, and then there is Petty blue, the signature color of their race cars. And then we look at the record, the all-time Cup standard of 200 victories by Richard Petty, the final one coming at Daytona when President Ronald Reagan attended the race and ate chicken with the drivers and their families afterward as part of the Independence Day celebration. What a heck of a way to make a living and create a legacy. So I don't know if it was the love of the car, the love of money, the love of beating everybody. I don't know what it was, but it was our life. And it just became our lifestyle and what we did. [MUSIC PLAYING] N/A