Richard petty biography
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The King
Born in Level Cross, North Carolina, in 1937, Richard Petty was exposed to the world of racing at an early age. He would often travel with his mother and brother Maurice to watch his father Lee race. Petty’s father was a very successful driver who won the inaugural running of the Daytona 500 in 1959. Richard Petty’s racing career began in 1958. He would be named NASCAR Rookie of the Year that season after producing 9 top-10 finishes and six top-5 finishes. Petty would score his first win in 1960 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
The win was an important first step in Petty’s impressive racing career. After some years of fighting his way through the pack, Petty had a breakthrough season in 1963 with wins at Martinsville and Bridgehampton. In 1964, driving a hemi-engineed Plymouth, Petty led 184 of the 200 laps to capture his first Daytona 500 victory. The win was one of eight for Petty that season and helped power him to his first championship. Petty w
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Richard Petty (1937 – )
Richard Petty was born on July 2, 1937 in Level Cross, North Carolina, to a racing family. Lee Petty, Richard’s father, won the NASCAR championship three times during the 1950s, and Richard grew up helping his father build race cars. In a 2008 interview with Sports Illustrated, Petty recalled his first memory of NASCAR as an eleven-year-old: “My mother, my father, my brother and myself rode over to the race in a great big ol’ Buick. We pulled it into a Texaco station – I remember this, I don’t know why – put it on a rack, greased the thing, changed the oil, took the muffler off, took the hubcaps off of it and put a number on it. Then it became a race car.” Ten years later just ten days after his twenty-first birthday, Richard formally entered the family business.
On July 12, 1958, Richard Petty raced for the first time in Columbia, South Carolina, and he finished sixth. It was the beginning of a successful
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By Ron Flatter
Special to ESPN.com
He has not won a race since 1984. His last championship came in 1979. But Richard Petty's big sunglasses, cowboy hat and that No. 43 still loom large over stock-car racing.
| Petty raced for a remarkable 34 years. |
His record sju Daytona 500 wins might fall some day, as might his seven Winston Cup championships. But what never can be displaced is the role Petty had building stock-car racing from a day at the beach for good ol' boys into a superspeedway idrott for the masses.
The winner of a remarkable 200 NASCAR races was a man for the people, a charismatic presence the way Arnie was for golf and Babe was for baseball. From the '50s to the '90s, millions flocked to see the races because of him -- "The King."
"It was as if Richard had written the script," driver Darrell Waltrip said, "and NASCAR just helped him out."
The script had many milestones: First stock-car racer to exceed $1 million