[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