Richard Petty

A day after he turned twenty-one, Petty let it be known that he was interested in racing. With an old Oldsmobile that Lee gave him, Petty drove in his first event in 1958, and followed the circuit across the country looking for his first win. Lee, in his own tight-lipped way, helped Petty learn the ropes. In his autobiography Petty reported the most important piece of advice that Lee gave him early on: "Richard, if you expect to make it in anything, you gotta put all you've got into it.… you have to work harder than the next guy if you expect to be a success." On the track, however, Lee treated his son in his usual take-no-prisoners racing fashion. In one early race, he forced Petty into the wall on a curve. In another, in 1959, Petty believed he had his first NASCAR victory—until Lee protested to a NASCAR official that Richard's laps had been miscounted. One lap short, Petty's victory was nullified and given to the second place finisher—Lee Petty.

In July 1959, when Petty finally won his first pro race at Columbia Speedway, his fabulous career was underway. He was named the NASCAR Grand National Rookie of the Year that same year. In 1960, he won his first Grand National event. In August 1960, for the first and only time, all three Pettys—Richard, Lee, and Maurice—took part in the same race, finishing second, third and eighth respectively. Petty won three races altogether that year, but finished in the Top ten thirty times, in the Top five sixteen times, and second in the NASCAR points standings. His years of watching his father and other racers up close was paying off. He knew how to drive strategically out on the track, and how other drivers used their cars. Petty was apparently an astonishingly relaxed driver. A physician who did a study of drivers' heart rates after driving hundreds of miles at dangerously high speeds with other drivers often only inches away, found that most exhibited wildly increased heartbeats. Petty's alone was virtually unaffected. The strain showed in other ways though. Years later ulcers ate away half of Petty's stomach, and the thunderous noise of the track had seriously impaired his hearing.

Between 1961 and 1964, Richard Petty came into his own as a driver. He won forty-five of the 262 NASCAR events in which he ran, finished in the Top five on a remarkable 147 occasions, and took home $317,536 in prize money. He recorded his first superspeedway win at the Daytona 500 in 1964 driving a Chrysler with a powerful 426-cubic-inch hemi-head engine. "The first time I cranked it," Petty told Bill Robinson of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, "I thought it was gonna suck the hood into the engine." He won that Daytona after leading 184 of the race's 200 laps, an achievement Bill Robinson called "the most lopsided achievement in big-track history in American racing." In response to the overwhelming superiority of Petty's automobile to others, NASCAR banned the use of hemi-head engines. The Pettys protested the ban by pulling out of NASCAR briefly in 1965. For the first part of the season, Petty participated only in drag racing. He returned to NASCAR later in the summer after a mechanical failure in one of his cars caused an accident in which a young boy was killed.

By 1967, bad crashes had long since driven both Lee and Maurice out of racing. It was Richard's greatest

Richard Petty, sitting in car

year, however. He won twenty-seven of his forty-eight events, including ten consecutive wins, and his second NASCAR championship. His most unexpected victory that season came in Nashville Tennessee. He was in the lead until a blown tire caused him to crash. By the time his crew had him ready to go again he was ten laps behind the leaders. He made up ground doggedly, however, and ended up winning by five laps. Early in the 1967 season he scored his 55th career win, overtaking his father Lee as the NASCAR's all-time win leader. 1967 was also the year when Petty was given the nickname by which he is best known. "A bunch of reporters got together, sitting around drinking their Budweisers, and got to talkin'," he told Bruce Lowitt of the St. Petersburg Times. "If my name had been Dale or Kyle or Darrell, it wouldn't have sounded like much. I mean, King Dale? But Richard was just a natural to go with King. They just throwed it in there. They'd been trying to name me the Randleman Rocket, all kinds of names. Never took hold. But first time anybody saw King Richard, it stuck."

Petty continued to show why he was the King in the 1970s. He became the first NASCAR driver to pass $1 million in career earnings in 1971. That same year he won his third Daytona 500—the Super Bowl of NASCAR—and his fourth and fifth two years in a row in 1973 and 1974. He won the 500 again just before the decade ended in 1979. Petty's most memorable Daytona 500, however, was in 1976—when he finished second. Petty was leading the race until its final lap when he was passed by David Pearson. When Petty attempted to get past Pearson on the last of Daytona's high-banked turns, he careened into Pearson's car and both spun off the wall and down toward the finish line. "For a bizarre moment," wrote the Washington Post's Dave Kindred, "it seemed Petty would win his game's biggest prize spinning backward under the checkered flag." His car stopped short, however, its engine dead while Pearson inched his car across the finish line at about ten miles per hour. Petty survived a number of other serious accidents in the course of his career. He looked to be dead at the Darlington Speedway after hitting the wall on a turn, then pinwheeling end over end into the pit wall. Fortunately he suffered no more than a dislocated shoulder, but after the Darlington wreck Petty helped develop the window net, that keeps drivers from flying out the window during crashes.

When Petty's son Kyle won his very first race in 1979 it seemed the torch was being passed to a new generation of Pettys. In the 1980s, Richard Petty won fewer races, two in 1980, three 1981, three in 1983, and two in 1984, including Petty's seventh Daytona 500 win and a win at the Firecracker 400, which would be the last of his career. In 1989 his record string of 513 consecutive starts that stretched back to 1969 ended when he missed a race at Richmond Virginia. He continued to take home purses throughout the eighties, however, winning $3.79 million between 1980 and his retirement in 1991, more than he won during his first twenty-eight years when he was having his heyday.

Those figures hint at the popularity that NASCAR racing had achieved by the 1980s, a popularity for which Richard Petty was almost single-handedly responsible. "Richard's been one of the people who's brought racing from when it wasn't a very respectable sport to where it is today," Junior Johnson, a former NASCAR star told Darrell Fry of the St. Petersburg Times. "He's contributed more to the sport than any other individual." As much as for his wins, Petty was famous for his friendliness to fans, remaining at tracks for hours after races to sign autographs and press the flesh. His feather-laden cowboy hats, wraparound sunglasses and fabulous smiles were still synonymous with stock car racing in 2002, thanks in part to his long-time commercial endorsements of STP. Just before the start of the 1992 NASCAR season Petty announced his retirement. He fittingly dubbed his final season the "Fan Appreciation Tour." Tens of thousands turned out across the country to see his last runs. He didn't win a single race, but it was clear he was still the most beloved driver on the circuit.

After he hung up his helmet, Petty devoted himself to running the family business, with its stable of drivers—which by the end of the 1990s included Petty's grandson Adam—Petty Enterprises, as well as overseeing The Richard Petty Driving Experience. The venture, founded in 1990, gave amateurs an opportunity to drive a stock car on a real NASCAR track. In February 1995 Petty made his TV debut as color commentator for a CBS broadcast of the Daytona 500.