Richard Petty: Building An Empire

The sport of NASCAR started as a need for speed for bootleggers during prohibition.  It has turned into a multi million dollar business.

The racing we see today is very different from the old days when it started.

Today, the sport was born in 1948 with the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing.
 
It has become one of the most popular and profitable sports in the country largely thanks to a country boy from Randleman, North Carolina.  He’s known simply as “The King.“
 
Seven championships, seven Daytona 500 victories and perhaps the most untouchable record, 200 career wins.
 
For more than three decades Richard Petty dominated on the track.

But before he took the thrown, Petty got his start in a small garage behind his house in Randleman where his father, Lee, would wrench on race cars.

“Dad just started his own business. He owned his own car, he was his own mechanic, he was his own crew chief. I mean, he drove it too and from the race track. You know, he took care of everything and we did it in the back yard,“ said Richard Petty.  Lee holds the distinction of being the first Daytona 500 winner.  “We ran the very first cup race in 1949. They were strictly, strictly stock car.“
 
Back in the late 40’s and early 50’s the sport of auto racing looked much different than it does today.

“It was very simple in the 50’s. You didn’t have all the technology, you didn’t have the engineers, you didn’t have the sponsorship, you didn’t have the money,“ explained Petty.
 
As the Petty’s racing careers started to grow, so did their shop.
 
If they had a good season and needed more room, they would simply add on.

“We’ve got 50 or 60 thousand feet and just a bunch of different building, a bunch of different doors. It’s not too organized, but it works,“ said Petty.
 
It works so well in fact that until 2008, this was central command for Petty’s race teams.
 
On the other side of every door, in every room—is a different story.
 
One is the red floor room.  You can probably guess why.  It’s where Petty’s race teams did all their car set up’s since the mid 80’s.
 
Throughout the series of shops the cars used to build the Petty empire are all around.
 
But days of tuning race engines have given way to building muscle.
 
This sanctuary of speed is now known as Petty’s Garage, a place Petty Enterprises uses for the building and fabrication of custom cars.

“Things change, so we had to change with it,“ said Petty.
 
The Petty name is synonymous with the sport and Richard Petty has seen it grow from the beaches of Daytona to the billion dollar business it is today.

“As time progressed, you got more PR, you got more people coming, you got sponsors to come in and bring money. Then as the money come in, the owners would go get engineers and it’s got to be very, very professional now. You know we thought it was professional, and it was, in 1950. But you know this is 2010, so we have to keep up with the trend of time,“ Petty explained.
 
In fact, Petty says very little about from the past has carried over to the present.

“I think my son, Kyle, explains it the best. The only thing thats the same about racing now as it was when it first started, is they throw the green flag and when its over they throw the checkered flag. Everything else is different, how you get there, how you run the race, the strategies; all that stuff is completely different,“ he said.
 
Petty’s last lap behind the wheel was in Atlanta in 1992.
 
Since then the legendary driver has become one of the sports biggest ambassadors.

“The old fans are like me, there’s fewer of us than there used to be, so we have to go after the new market,“ Petty said.  That new market means new ideas and new ways of racing, something that’s drawn criticism from purists.  “They have got away from their roots, but the roots were good in 1950 or 1960, the roots wouldn’t be good in 2010.“
 
He says things have changed—all the sport can do is change with them and drawing comparisons between then and now is all but impossible, “It’s like apples and oranges, you can’t compare because you had different circumstances, different cars running against different people and so one era doesn’t really go into another era.“
 
A modest answer for a man who is arguably just as recognizable as any one of today’s super stars.
 
After all, they don’t call him the king for nothing.

“I don’t think much about it. I’d rather be called that than a lot of other things I’ve heard people call me so I’ll settle for king,“ he laughed.