There’s only one King in NASCAR
Photo by ISC Images & Archives via Getty Images
Richard Petty doesn’t have to defend his credentials
The King’s accomplishments stand alone. Petty accumulated seven Cup championships and 200 wins in 1,184 starts at 51 different tracks.
Although Kyle Busch is closing in on 200 victories across NASCAR’s top three tours--and could reach the milestone this weekend at Auto Club Speedway--Petty believes the comparison to his Cup record is unwarranted.
“He’s taking a Cup team and going back to the guys that are just trying to get started,” Petty said of Busch. “It’s not comparing apples and oranges. It’s like a professional guy coming back and playing college ball and then coming back and playing high school.
“But I’m not trying to take away from anything he’s trying to accomplish.”
Petty acknowledged that Busch’s talent and achievements are remarkable. There’s no doubt that the 33-year-old champion could have raced and won in any of NASCAR’s seven decades against the King, David Pearson, Bobby Allison or Cale Yarborough.
“He is a great driver,” Petty said. “He’s one of those guys you could put in competition against all of the greats that have been here before. In other words, running against the Allisons, running against Pearson—all of these guys. He would have been competitive no matter what time they stuck him in as far as his career. He would have been very competitive with us, just like Pearson and them would have been competitive with those guys today.
“With a guy like Kyle, he has talent to drive any kind of car on any kind of surface—road course—even on dirt. It wouldn’t take him but 15 minutes and he would be as good as anybody there.
Any race track you go to, he’s going to be in the top two or three that you’ve got to beat. There’s about four or five of them right now, no matter where you go, those are the guys you’ve got to beat.”
Over the three-and-a-half decades that Petty raced, the schedule varied from as many as 62 races in a season to as few as 29 events. When he won his first championship in 1964, the Grand National calendar featured 40-lap qualifying races at Daytona, 125-mile races on dirt at Concord (N.C.) as well as the 600-mile marathon across Cabarrus County at Charlotte Motor Speedway. That year Petty finished second to his teammate Jim Pascal in the World 600. He was four laps off the pace, and only 16 drivers completed the race.
Petty competed in 61 of 62 races that year, won nine with an average finish of 7.3 but wasn’t running at the end of 20 events. Pearson was the only other driver that started 61 races. Ned Jarrett ran 59. Of the 170 drivers with starts that season, 17 drivers won. Early in Petty’s career, he also raced against world-class drivers such as Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Parnelli Jones and Dan Gurney.
“We raced against different competition, we had the Woods boys, we had Bud Moore, Junior Johnson, Holman and Moody,” Petty said. “They were the teams I had to beat. And now he’s running against the teams he has to beat. Basically, there were more drivers that could win back then than there are today.”
Over the 35 seasons that Petty raced, it was a different era and a different style of competition. Where Petty might race one or two cars throughout the year with “probably 20 people doing everything," today’s powerhouses such as Joe Gibbs Racing, Team Penske, Stewart-Haas Racing and Hendrick Motorsports have hundreds of employees on the road and in the shop.
“The only thing you can compare it to is ‘What are they doing today against the competition, and what did we do against our competition?’ Even though it’s called racing, it’s a completely different kind of racing,” Petty says.
The 81-year-old also won in NASCAR’s Convertible Series and what is now the K&N Pro Series at Phoenix Raceway. But those four victories are not tallied in his 200 Cup wins. Petty compares today’s NASCAR ladder with Cup at the top to the farms clubs in stick and ball.
“He’s won over a 100 races in 2A and 1A,” Petty says of Busch’s 147 wins between the Gander Outdoors Truck and Xfinity Series. “So he went backwards instead of coming up through that deal. He went back to it. I’m not taking anything away from his ability or his car deal, but the competition in the other two leagues—Truck and (Xfinity)—is not there.”
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