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Swerve or Die: Life at My Speed in the First Family of NASCAR Racing



Swerve or Die: Life at My Speed in the First Family of NASCAR Racing PDF

Author: Kyle Petty

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Genres:

Publish Date: August 9, 2022

ISBN-10: 1250277817

Pages: 288

File Type: Epub

Language: English

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Book Preface

I was in England with my daughter Montgomery Lee, looking at Welsh horses.

My son Adam was at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway with his red-and-black no. 45 Sprint PCS Chevrolet. His regular guys—Chris Hussey, Chris Martin, Scott Kuhn, Steve Mitchell, and Stephen Patseavouras—were at the track with him. A rising young racer and his crew, all good friends, doing exactly what they wanted to be doing with their lives. The Busch 200 was set for Saturday. Friday was for practice and qualifying. All of which just gave me another reason to smile.

The Cup teams had the weekend off. For us, it was a two-week breather between the Pontiac Excitement 400 in Richmond, which Dale Earnhardt, Jr., had won, becoming the first repeat winner of the season, and the Winston, the all-star race on May 20 in Charlotte. A perfect time for a father-daughter getaway!

The NASCAR world had been buzzing about Adam ever since he’d won an ARCA race (part of the NASCAR feeder series named for the Automobile Racing Club of America), his first ever, at eighteen years and three months old, the youngest driver to ever do that. You know whose record he broke? Mine. I was eighteen years and eight months old. There we were, Adam and I, already making our own family traditions! He was now in his second season as a Busch Series regular, itching to move up to Cup Series racing, NASCAR’s main event. No one could say for sure how far Adam might go in racing. It was much too early to speculate. But when people asked me how I felt about my son’s career choice, I always had the same answer: “Like any dad feels when his teenager leaves the driveway for the first time. I sure hope he makes it back safe.”

I thought the line was funny. It almost always got a laugh.

It had been quite a spring for the Pettys. On April 5, my grandfather, Lee Petty, the patriarch of the Petty racing family, had died at eighty-six. What my grandfather started, my father, Richard Petty, and my uncle, Maurice Petty, carried on—it always felt more to me like a family business or a family farm than anything as grand as most people made it out to be. Stock car racing had supported our family for more than half a century, brought amazing joy into our lives, and gotten Adam labeled the first fourth-generation professional athlete in America. That sounded nice. But when you thought about it, it was also an awfully weighty legacy for a nineteen-year-old to haul around. Adam was just a kid, as anyone who knew him at all could plainly see.

And let’s be honest, I wasn’t exactly tearin’ ’em up in my no. 44 Hot Wheels Pontiac. Just one top 10 finish so far that season, my twentieth as a Cup regular. But I wasn’t sweating it. The season was just getting rolling, and I felt like I was starting to fall into a good rhythm. Plus, I had decided in my mind to step back from driving and move out of my son’s way as my father, for personal and financial reasons, had been unable to move out of mine. My dad won his seventh NASCAR championship the year I started. He loved racing too much to quit. I didn’t want to do that to Adam. I wanted him to have every chance to thrive. Once he was really up and running, he should be the Petty driver, I believed.

Montgomery Lee was fourteen and loved horses at least as much as her brother Adam loved race cars, which is to say she really, really loved them. She rode Western and seemed to have a knack for it. She had a beautiful bay mare named Dawn, and they’d been doing well together at some serious horse shows. Montgomery Lee wanted to see what showing horses was like in England. So, we were going to a show at a castle outside London. For me, it was that one week a year where it was just the two of us.

I didn’t know much about horses, and what I did know was entirely from the dad’s perspective. I knew it didn’t make any difference whether your daughter had a $2 million horse or a $2 horse. It still ate the same amount of food. And I knew that, however much you thought your daughter’s love of horses was going to cost you, you had no earthly idea. As I told my friend Jeff Burton when his daughter started riding: “Figure up how much that horse is gonna cost and multiply it by ten. Get the money in five-dollar bills, and go to the Bank of America building in Charlotte. Then, throw all that money off the roof. It’ll be much cheaper that way.” Jeff didn’t believe me—until one day he did. “If only I had known,” he said with a laugh. He wasn’t complaining any more than I was. My daughter loved horses, and her daddy was along for the ride.

We had a magical Saturday at the horse show. The beautiful castle. The impressive animals. The talented riders. The look on Montgomery Lee’s face as she took it all in. There was a message waiting for me in the lobby when we got back to the hotel.

“Call Mike Helton.”


From the highest highs to the lowest lows, no one has lived the NASCAR life quite the way that I have. Thankfully, along with the worst nightmare any father can imagine, I’ve also been blessed with far more than my share of amazing experiences, special relationships, and thrilling race-day triumphs. I’ll tell you this much, as NASCAR begins to reimagine its future and the sport confronts a whole new period of upheaval and change: It’s been one hell of a ride so far—for me and for racing—and I can’t wait to share with you exactly what I see up ahead!

Born into racing royalty. The only son of NASCAR’s winningest driver ever. The grandson of one of the sport’s true pioneers. The nephew of our very first Hall of Fame engine builder. It’s quite a family to represent, and through it all, I’ve somehow managed to keep being Kyle.

I wouldn’t attempt to tell the whole story of NASCAR entirely through people named Petty, but you almost could. My father, Richard, won two hundred races, a record that could easily hold forever, and seven Cup Series championships. Now well into his eighties, he remains NASCAR’s undisputed King and still has his fingers in damn near everything, including the racial reexamination that has gripped our sport. When all that exploded, Bubba Wallace, the talented young African American driver who demanded the Confederate flag be banned, was part of Richard Petty Motorsports. And there was my father, in his signature black Charlie 1 Horse cowboy hat, standing right at Bubba’s side. Whatever’s happening in NASCAR, my dad’s been at the center of the action for more than sixty years.

My Grandfather Petty was there at the start. He flipped his car in the very first NASCAR race ever and won the inaugural Daytona 500. His era began when stock car racing was little more than a bunch of country boys in the moonshine business trying to outrun each other and the tax man. It was Grandfather Petty who became NASCAR’s first full-time driver and one of its earliest stars. Before him, driving a race car wasn’t even considered a job. He finished top 5 in points every year from NASCAR’s formation in 1949 until 1959 and won three national championships in those years. It should have been four. But he pissed off NASCAR founder Bill France, who docked him in points for driving in an unsanctioned but very well-paid race. Grandfather Petty didn’t care. He always preferred the cash to the trophies.

My uncle Maurice, who passed in the summer of 2020, rarely got the credit that Richard and Lee have been given. I won’t be making that mistake here. While the drivers soak up most of the attention, the cars wouldn’t go anywhere without the hard work and the genius of the mechanics in the garages and the pits. That’s something I figured out early, and I’ve never forgotten it. It’s just one of many lessons you learn growing up Petty.

As for me, I was tossed into the family station wagon and dragged to the races even before I graduated from a bottle to a sippy cup. From the Allisons to the Earnhardts to the Waltrips, from the Cales to the Dales to the Jeffs and the Jimmies, my sisters and I got to know just about everyone who was anyone in racing, and I still know ’em all, along with their wives, ex-wives, aunts, uncles, children, cousins, grandchildren, and dogs. No, it wasn’t your typical American upbringing. And, yes, it’s fair to say that NASCAR is more than a little intertwined.

I was helping out at the Petty race shop in Level Cross, North Carolina, by the time I was in junior high school. I started racing professionally as soon as I turned eighteen. Somehow, I wore down my father’s insistence that I wait until twenty-one, like his father had demanded that he wait. My own driving record never held a candle to my father’s or my grandfather’s—but, really, whose did? Across a long, action-packed career of 829 NASCAR Cup Series races, I won, lost, and crashed on some of the fastest, wildest, scariest, and most storied racetracks in America. And with Adam’s entry into racing, the Petty tradition I had inherited was about to be passed on again.


I had known Mike Helton since he was sports director of a small AM radio station in Bristol, Tennessee, and worked public relations part-time at the Bristol Motor Speedway. After working at racetracks in Atlanta, Daytona Beach, and Talladega, Mike took a job with NASCAR, where he became the first person without the name France to run day-to-day operations. He would soon be appointed NASCAR’s third president, replacing Bill France, Jr. I can and will say this about Mike: He was a racing guy through and through.

He skipped all the pleasantries and got right to the reason for his call.

“Adam’s been in a bad wreck,” he said to me. “He’s been transported to the hospital.”

You know that feeling you get when someone punches you in the stomach? This didn’t feel like that at all. This was more like the air coming out of a balloon. I didn’t feel pain. I just felt suddenly deflated.

Mike didn’t seem to know much yet, but he promised: “I’ll call the minute I know any more.”

Montgomery Lee was up in the room. I stayed down in the lobby. Since I didn’t know what to tell her yet, I didn’t tell her anything. Mike was back on the phone maybe twenty minutes later.

Calling back so quickly, I knew it couldn’t be good.

“Man,” he said, reaching for the right words and realizing there weren’t any, “I’m so sorry. He didn’t make it.”

Short and to the point.

I didn’t ask Mike a lot of questions. I didn’t really want to know every last detail. There’d be time for that later. All Mike said was that it was a single-car collision during a practice round. Nobody else was hurt. What else did I really need to know?

“Thank you for calling,” I said to Mike before I headed upstairs to talk to my daughter and try to make sense of the two-by-four that had just been slammed against the side of my head.


There may be a couple of people who are more steeped in the world of NASCAR than I am, but I kinda doubt it. And no one can afford to speak any more freely than I can. Honestly, what’s anyone gonna do to me?

In every role I’ve ever played—and by now I’ve played just about all of them: racer, car owner, motorcycle rider, country singer, songwriter, camp counselor, broadcaster, Christian, voice actor, body-art proponent, philanthropist, son, brother, husband, dad, and friend—I’ve come to be known as an outsider-insider, someone whose knowledge goes all the way back to the ancients and who isn’t afraid to hang his opinions out to dry. I can get along with just about anybody, but I always say what I think. And I don’t waste time worrying how others might respond.

“That’s just Kyle,” people have been saying for decades. And I don’t suppose they’ll be stopping any time soon. They may not always love my ponytail. But no one’s ever accused me of being boring, dishonest, or shy. Or taking myself too seriously.

These days, I hang out on what some of my friends jokingly call the dark side, analyzing and commentating on NASCAR for NBC Sports. Then, I toss out a tweet or two, having jumped into social media in 2009 when most NASCAR people were still hesitant. I interview my friends on Coffee with Kyle, a digital series for NBC Sports focusing on the history of NASCAR, and Dinner Drive with Kyle Petty, a TV show on Circle Network that’s all about cars, good food, and great conversations with notable names in sports and entertainment. And every chance I get, hang out with Morgan, Overton, and Cotten at home. Telling stories. Swapping gossip. Getting laughs. Getting more laughs. Solving all the world’s problems whether anyone’s asked me to or not. Sharing my feelings about the racing world in ways that hardly anyone else will dare to.

This book has been decades in the making. I am so excited to say, “Here it is.”

You may be a lifelong NASCAR fan who craves to know the story behind the story behind the story. You may be itching for the inside version that only I can tell. Or you may be a curious newcomer, shaking your head and wondering, “What the heck is going on in there?” Whatever brought you, get ready for an eye-opening, nerve-racking, soul-bending romp through this crazy sport of ours, just as its future is being debated, defined, and declared.

For better or worse, NASCAR has never been more important in politics, culture, and business—not just of the American South but of the whole United States and, increasingly, beyond. You certainly can’t understand America without understanding the people, places, and events that live in the pages to come.

I promise I won’t shy away from the tough stuff. I never do. And that includes my own dark days after Adam’s accident, my decision to keep driving longer than I probably should have, and the wonderful joy that is Victory Junction and the Kyle Petty Charity Ride Across America. Through it all and still today, I’ve never forgotten how blessed I am.

But I’m getting ahead of myself already. We’ll get to all of it. The racing. The characters. The controversies. The big, sprawling, complicated family. The dramatic changes that are already shaking NASCAR and redefining this sport that we love and that also sometimes drives us crazy. NASCAR is finding its place in a rapidly changing world. So the sport is changing too. There are exciting possibilities and hidden obstacles ahead. We need to sort them out. It’ll be an amazing journey for those who can handle the speed.

Come on. I’ll show you. Let’s take a ride.


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