NASCAR’s King Appreciates, Respects Racing Royalty Competing in Indy 500
June 05, 2020 | By Bruce Martin
Richard Petty grew up around stock car racing, not INDYCAR racing. But when “The King” of NASCAR was a teenager working on the stock car driven by his father, Lee, in the early 1950s, he remembers hearing Sid Collins’ voice on the radio describing a race so big, so epic that Petty was mesmerized by the description of the event.
It was the Indianapolis 500. Petty heard the legendary names as Bill Vukovich, Johnnie Parsons, Duke Nalon and others battling it out at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“I was 12 or 14 years old; I could remember working on the race car at home and listening to the race on the radio,” Petty said. “It started at 11 a.m. in North Carolina, and I’d be working on the race car and remember the Novi cars running. At that time, I had never been out in the real world of INDYCAR racing, but I knew them by name. I knew most of their names, and they were the big names of auto racing.
“To a boy laying under the car in Level Cross, North Carolina, the Indianapolis 500 was bigger than life. All of this happened before we ever had Daytona or anything like that in our sport when I started driving race cars in the late 1950s.”
For years, Petty was a regular visitor on Pole Day for the Indy 500 because of his involvement with longtime sponsor STP. But in 2009, Petty got to attend Race Day at Indy for the first time.
“Going to Indy, it’s the biggest thing that happens in auto racing,” Petty said. “Daytona is big in NASCAR, but Indy is the biggest race there is. The big deal to me is seeing all those people there, all the enthusiasm and the command, `Gentlemen, start your engines,’ then to see them come down for that first lap in a pack where you could throw a blanket over all of them.
“It kind of takes your breath away. I’m just real fortunate that I’ve been able to do this. When I wander around up there, it’s people I’ve known for 100 years. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, it was like old home week for me. It was a day where I could let my hair down. I would hang out with the guys that drove for STP like Mario Andretti and Gordon Johncock and drivers like that. STP was a big, big part of the Indy 500.”
Today, Petty plays an active role in Richard Petty Motorsports in the NASCAR Cup Series. Bubba Wallace drives the famous No. 43 for the team, which will compete July 5 in the Big Machine Vodka 400 at the Brickyard at IMS.
Petty was a popular figure at Indy long before the Inaugural Brickyard 400 in 1994. He remembers visiting INDYCAR drivers in the old wooden garages in Gasoline Alley. Petty was a Pole Day visitor for “at least 15 years in a row” and spoke of what the Indy 500 meant to him.
“I appreciated what they had accomplished since 1909 when the track opened,” Petty said. “I was also fascinated with the mechanical part of it – what they did with their cars; how they kept them on the ground, the suspension and the mechanical things they did to go as fast as they did.
“To me, it’s like the Kentucky Derby or the Super Bowl or the World Series. It is the happening event of the time.”
Petty was at the Indy 500 on Race Day in 2009 as the entrant for driver John Andretti. He then flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, for the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR race that evening at Charlotte Motor Speedway. He also joined forces with Andretti and his cousin Michael’s team, Andretti Autosport, for an Indy 500 entry in 2010 and 2011.
King Richard nearly put a deal together with A.J. Foyt back in the 1965 when Chrysler’s Hemi engine was outlawed by NASCAR. Petty was under contract to Chrysler and did not compete in NASCAR, spending a year in drag racing instead.
“We were running over a USAC stock car race on the road course at IRP, and we came over to the Speedway to see A.J. Foyt,” Petty said. “A lot of those teams worked over at the Speedway during the season out of those garages in Gasoline Alley. That was their home during the season. We went wandering over there, and we knew Foyt and saw his shop and his car.
“He tried to stuff me into one of those things. He went into his locker and came out with a size 7 shoe. He said I had to put those shoes on because that was all the room there was for the brake and clutch and accelerator. That is when I knew that I couldn’t be an INDYCAR driver because my feet were too big.”