Weekend That Was: M'ville

MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- It's story-telling time.

And who is better to tell a few tales than Kyle Petty, who made his 810th start at NASCAR's highest level of competition last Sunday in the Subway 500 at Martinsville Speedway?

Petty has been racing at the Cup level since 1979, when his father, Richard, won the last of his record seven driving championships. It was the same year Dale Earnhardt, who would go on to tie the elder Petty with seven title of his own, drove in his first Daytona 500.

• Send Joe your thoughts
• Joe's Community page

Jimmy Carter was the President of the United States, and presiding over a hostage crisis in Iran -- where a revolution had disrupted oil exports and driven up gasoline prices all over the world. In the U.S., gas prices jumped from a national average of 65 cents per gallon to nearly 90 cents in less than a year. Some feared it would soon cost more than $1 per gallon.

In other words, Petty has been racing for a while. And he found it fitting that he moved into fifth place on the all-time list for Cup starts at Martinsville, which has always been a favored track of the Petty family.

"I've been coming here so long ..." Petty said last weekend from the hauler of the No. 45 Dodge he currently drives for Petty Enterprises. "It's funny how it's worked out. I've missed a ton of races. I've just missed races in my life. And it's funny how missing those races made it all work out. I made my 800th start at Indy -- which is a big race for us. And now I'm moving into the top five at Martinsville.

"Martinsville has always been a special place for us."

He remembers coming to Martinsville as a kid, watching his daddy race. Well, sort of watching Richard race; many times young Kyle was off into other things.

He said he especially remembers the old scoreboard, which had to be manipulated manually. It was done so at a more leisurely pace than the sport could now tolerate.

"You physically had to change the scoreboard. There was a man who sat on a stool, and every 10 laps he would walk down and change the numbers," Petty recalled. "Then he would go back and sit down. Ten laps later, he would go back to the end of the scoreboard and change it again."

The scoreboard also had room for the top-five leaders in the race. And whenever it was over, Petty would stage a race of his own -- on foot -- with the sons of drivers David Pearson and Bobby Allison, or car owners Glen and Leonard Wood.

"We would run across the racetrack when the race was over, and we would put 43 on everything. We would climb up the steps and put 43 straight across the board. The scoreboard wasn't five feet off the ground," Petty said. "You'd stand around for a little while and then Larry and Ricky [Pearson] would put 21 on everything for the Wood Brothers. Or Davey [Allison] and those guys would run across and put 12 up for Bobby when he was driving the Coca-Cola Chevy in the early '70s, when we were 10 or 12 years old.

"It's cool because those are my memories of these places. Playing football in the infield. Hanging out in the infield. Watching the race, but at the same time taking in just all the little things like the Grandfather clock and the stuff that used to happen here that don't happen anymore. It's not that kind of sport anymore. It's great that you break a record or move into another place on a list. But those are the things that I remember most about a place like this."

Petty was asked if he is surprised by the staggering growth the sport has undergone since those simpler times.

"I think the answer for me to that is a resounding yes and no, OK?" Petty answered. "And my point is this: I grew up in the '60s. When I was 7 and 8 or 9 years old, The King switched from Dodge to Ford and back to Dodge and Plymouth. We were going from Fonda, N.Y. and Islip [N.Y.], short tracks in what we called the Northern Tour. You'd race at these places and there would be 10,000 or 15,000 people there, and you'd think, 'Man, it'll never get any bigger than this.'

Kyle Petty, circa 1997

"Then I grew up racing in the '80s and '90s, and you thought, 'Man, it'll never get any bigger than this.' And now we're here in 2007 and you say, 'Man, it'll never get any bigger than this.'

"So if you look at the progression that followed from '65 to '85, and then from '85 to 2005, and that's probably the rate it should have grown. You know what I mean? If you look at it and extrapolate it out from what it did in this 20 years and what it did in the next 20, you would hope that it would grow that way. Any business would hope that they would grow like that."

But the massive growth came at a price, Petty added.

"I think the part that kind of surprises you now more than anything is that as it grew through those periods for me, it was still a Southeastern sport. In '85 to the early '90s, it was still a Southeastern sport," Petty said. "Everybody wanted to give it lip service that we were racing in California and we were racing in other places, but it was still a Southeastern sport. Now we look at it and we see there is one racetrack in North Carolina. ... It fell from eight races within a 150-mile radius of Charlotte to three races. So we as fans have lost that, and that's the heart of where the sport was.

"I don't think it surprises you. I'm amazed by it, but I won't say I'm surprised by it -- if that makes sense."

Asked what it means to have been able to make so many starts, Petty, who has eight career victories but none since 1995, naturally had a complex but thought-provoking answer.

"It means I'm old," he said. "It means I've been doing it a long time. I look at it, and probably in 10 or 15 years you'll look back and say it means something. Today, I just think it's really cool.

"And I've said this before: to have raced against Richard Petty and Darrell Waltrip when they won championships, to have raced against Ricky Rudd, to have raced against Dale Sr. his rookie year. ... and then to have come along and raced against Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart and Bobby Labonte and guys like that as they have won races, and then to move one step further and have raced against guys like Kyle Busch and Casey Mears, that's the coolest part. That's what that eight-hundred and whatever number it is means to me more than anything else. I've been very blessed to have seen Pearson and Petty, Earnhardt and [Rusty] Wallace, Gordon and Stewart, and now Busch and guys like that.

"So when I look at it, I don't look at the amount of races. I really don't. I don't look at the years I've been doing this. What I look at is the people who have come through this sport, and the great names in this sport that have come through here -- that I consider myself blessed to have been able to race against, to see their talent and see what they've done, and to be a part of the sport at a time when these great guys come through."

To put into a perspective that truly is mind-boggling, Petty then added: "It would be like being a baseball player, and playing against [Babe] Ruth and [Hank] Aaron and Barry Bonds all at the same time. It would be like during the span of your career being able to see and play against all three great home-run hitters at the same time. When you start talking Petty, Earnhardt and Gordon, you've seen all three of them at the same time. So that for me, is the bigger deal."

Different times, Part I

Petty also spoke of how the sport seems to be cyclical in so many ways, and that how long drivers drive apparently is one of them.

Let him explain.

"When you talk to Ned [Jarrett] and Junior [Johnson], you ask 'em, 'Why did you retire so young?' They'll tell you the reason is that that's the way other professional athletes did it. Baseball players retired young. They were comparing themselves to other sports even at that time, so they retired young," Petty said.

"And then all of a sudden guys in our sport started going into their early 50s. So when I started, and you're racing against your father and Bobby Allison, David Pearson and Cale Yarborough and Buddy Baker, you start thinking, 'Yeah, well, I can race into my 50s, too, then.' Heck, Harry Gant didn't even start until he was 50, it didn't seem like."

That won't happen with the current generation, Petty predicted.

"These guys now, they don't expect to go long. And the demands are a lot greater. But beyond what the demands are, they just don't expect it," Petty said. "I think these guys look at it and whether they admit it or not, I think a lot of them already have a day in their mind -- 36, 41, whatever it may be -- where they see themselves tapering off and doing something different. That's another part of the sport that has changed."

Different times, Part II

Petty had more to say about the current crop of younger drivers in general.

NASCAR's most famous ponytail

"For us, the sport is our family. ... Older drivers, when you talk to Ricky [Rudd] or you talk to Bill [Elliott] or you talk to my father, they grew up being part of the sport, they became part of the sport, and they remain connected to the sport. Now we'll start to see drivers walk away and you'll never hear from them again," Petty said.

"We grew up in a time when you took from the sport, but at some point in time you gave back to the sport in some little way, whatever that may be. I think we're moving into a stage where everything is taken and nothing is given. We hear that all the time -- and some people call that a lack of respect. I don't call it that. It's just a totally different sport. These guys see and approach the sport different.

"When I grew up, I wanted to be a racecar driver. I dreamed about driving a racecar. That's all I dreamed about -- driving a racecar and getting a trophy. I didn't dream about sitting on my butt signing autographs; I didn't dream about talking to you guys [in the media]. I'm sorry, but I didn't dream about this. This was not my dream -- to grow up and talk to the media and be on TV and do all that stuff. My dream was to drive racecars. I think for some of these guys, their dream is to be famous. And to be famous, they dream about signing autographs, they dream about doing interviews. Now they may not act like it to you guys, but that's part of their package. They didn't dream about just driving racecars.

"We always saw ourselves as part of the sport, and they see themselves as different from the sport. Not above the sport, just different. Not as much a part of the sport."

Thumbs up

To Petty (who else?), for such an entertaining trip down memory lane and a peek into what he foresees as the future of racing. And, by the way, he pulled off a solid 21st-place finish in the Subway 500, which is respectable when you are racing to keep your team within the top 35 in owner points.

Thumbs down

To the 21 cautions Sunday, which made it difficult for anyone to gain any kind of real rhythm or long-term momentum.

Pit stops

• Look out for Juan Montoya next year at Martinsville, where knowing how to use and save your brakes is so important. Crew chief Donnie Wingo was pleasantly surprised -- and impressed -- to find that Montoya finished Sunday's race with over three-eighths of an inch left on his brake pads. "Here at Martinsville with these cars the way they are, as heavy as they are to stop, that's pretty huge," Wingo said after Montoya's eighth-place finish.

• Greg Biffle had another strong run Sunday, continuing his late-season surge that was interrupted briefly by a tough race in Charlotte the previous week. He finished seventh. The only non-Chaser to finish ahead of him was Ryan Newman, who grabbed second and might have given eventual race-winner Jimmie Johnson all he could handle at the end if not for the final caution flag.

• The Craftsman Truck Series continues be highly entertaining this year, with Mike Skinner capturing his fifth victory of the season this past Saturday at Martinsville to move from 14 points behind Ron Hornaday in the point standings to 11 ahead. It was the fourth time in the past five races they've swapped the top spot. Asked earlier if the Truck drivers had a special code where they left their anger on the track and didn't let it carry over, Skinner delivered one of the best quotes of the weekend when he replied: "I think NASCAR has helped us with that because years ago we could jump out of the truck and beat on somebody and it would cost us $250. Now it's $10,000, $15,000 or $25,000, so NASCAR definitely has helped us out with that."

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.