Needing A King-Size Comeback

In the '60s, many a young male worked to keep his stomach flat. He and his buddies wore flattops, cut shirtsleeves off at the shoulders, pegged pants, and danced to "60-Minute Man." Athletes would seldom wander past a mirror without stopping to admire themselves. It was the height of virility.

Out in the country around Level Cross in Randolph County, North Carolina, there was of a man in his early 20s who smiled easily with a masculinity that never threatened anybody. That young man's name was Richard Petty. He had few worries, and was fast becoming the superstar of stock car racing.

He realized his mission in life. He turned wrenches on the race car driven by his daddy, Lee Petty, who was among the first drivers on the circuit that would become the NASCAR Winston Cup Series. Lee won three NASCAR championships in the '50s and a career total of 55 races. He was also tough. "If there ain't at least a little hurt in your life every day, you ain't living hard enough," he would say.

Lee founded Petty Enterprises. His first shop was in an old reaper shed behind his house. The reaper, once used to harvest wheat on his small farm, ended up out in the woods behind the shop. As the sport grew, Lee, Richard, and brother Maurice knocked down walls and expanded the reaper shed as they needed space. That's the way most of Petty Enterprises came about: one big room at a time, constructed as needed.

Richard raced until 1992. He won 200 races and seven Winston Cup championships. Since then, Bobby Hamilton has won two races for Petty Enterprises, and John Andretti one. Those are the last victories for Petty Enterprises since Richard won three races in 1983. Since 1949, however, Petty cars have crossed the finish line first in 271 races.

All this leaves Kyle Petty, Richard's son, going through an ordeal. He now runs the family operation, so it's all in his hands to either make or break Petty Enterprises.

Kyle tried to run Petty Enterprises once before while his father drove for Mike Curb. Kyle left the home shop after the '84 season to drive for the Wood Brothers. Richard came home in 1986. Kyle left the Wood Brothers team for SABCO racing in 1990 and, finally, at the end of the '98 season, he too moved back home.

"We've been through some rough times, but we kept the place breathing," Richard says. "I have a lot of confidence in Kyle. He came along and won the first stock car race he ever entered, an ARCA event at Daytona in 1979. He's won some Winston Cup races, and he started his own team in 1997, but merged it with Petty Enterprises and moved it into the family shop." Prior to starting the 2003 season, Kyle was upbeat about the team's chances to turn things around.

"It is exciting to see what we are doing at Petty Enterprises to get back on top," Kyle says. "It's no secret we fell on hard times and we are having to build the team back to the past."

What Went Wrong

Richard tries to explain how Petty Enterprises has gotten so far behind the competition. "What happened is, racing has changed so much," he says. "There is so much more money, more engineering, and more technical stuff. Sure, we are struggling, but when I look across the board, I see a lot of other people struggling, too; some struggling more than others."

Richard says the team changed its whole philosophy when it switched to Dodge in 2001. "We talked over everything. We said, 'OK, we haven't been doing too well, but we haven't been doing so bad, either. We have been keeping our heads above water, but we are not winning like we should.'"

Richard says the team decided to get rid of the Richard Petty philosophy and adopt the Kyle Petty philosophy.

"Let's go back to when we were an individual team," Richard says. "Dale Inman, Maurice, and myself ran the operation. You can't run a racing operation like that today. Racing got bigger and bigger and it got away from us. We were not a company. We were three people making it work. So now, under Kyle's leadership, we are trying to become a company."

During most of the Richard Petty era, there were four dominant teams in racing--Petty Enterprises, Junior Johnson & Associates, the Wood Brothers, and the Bud Moore team.

"When this crowd came along, everybody did their individual stuff," Richard says. "We had to build our own cars, make our own parts, and figure out how to do things to the cars we wanted done.

"Now the chassis are built, the front ends are built, and every part is built and there for you to buy. In other words, if you have the money, you can go out and buy all the parts and pieces you need to race. You can buy everything a winning team has to make them go.

"Back then we built everything, and maybe added a little something. The teams would give and take. Now you can buy a kit and put everything together yourself. Then it gets technical, and it is just a matter of how technical you want to get."

Richard says the team continues to look around. "You look over here and your competition has more engineers, so you get more engineers," he says. "You look over the other way and the competition on that side has more technical-type people. So, you go out and get more technical-type people. All the while you are getting further and further away from the racing end of it, and more toward the technical end. We got behind on the technical end."

The first time Richard heard someone talking about a wind tunnel, he thought they were talking about airplanes. "We didn't hire people who knew about wind tunnels," he says. "We were winning at the time, and it didn't seem to matter." Junior Johnson, Glen and Leonard Wood, and Bud Moore were all doing things just like the Pettys.

"The big problem for all of us is that we didn't see the changes coming," Richard says. "We were doing so well with what we had that none of us noticed the Rick Hendricks and Jack Roushes of the world slipping up on us. Oh, I noticed that different people were coming in the sport, but I didn't think they knew anything about racing. They didn't, but they went out and hired engineers to put these parts together, not guys off the farm who did things by working hard.

"Pretty soon I began noticing a lot of tire engineers walking around in the pits, and that these guys didn't do anything except take care of tires. And there would be another guy who didn't take care of anything but the brakes, and another who looked after the rearends. It took these people

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