Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 2, 1992 TAG: 9202020085
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: GREENSBORO, N.C. LENGTH: Long
THE END OF AN ERA
STOCK-CAR racing king Richard Petty is preparing to retire after 35 years and at a time in which the sport is booming despite the recession.\ As the NASCAR boys rocket down another $12 million road on the 1992 Winston Cup Tour, the great stoic legend among them, Richard Petty, watches the curtain fall on his mighty career.
This is the end of an era.
If you haven't been to the races lately, get those tickets, grab the kids and hustle them out to the track for a last glimpse of the greatest stock-car racer of all time.
In a sport as young as stock-car racing, the children of today, who will carry the sport deep into the 21st century, still can touch and hear and see the pioneers who started this crazy stuff by racing their moonshine haulers in cow pastures.
Richard Petty, known widely as "The King," raced against Dale Earnhardt in the 1980s and Earnhardt's father in the 1950s and early 1960s, not to mention his own father, who competed in the first NASCAR-sanctioned race in 1948.
Rough-edged Lee Petty, 77, the patriarch of the sport's most well-known family, is happy to be alive today and doing darn well what he pleases as he putters around the Petty Enterprises shops in Level Cross, N.C.
In Martinsville, Va., H. Clay Earles, 78, celebrates the 45th anniversary of his track, Martinsville Speedway, which outdates NASCAR.
"I can remember watching Buddy Baker, Richard Petty and later Kyle Petty and Davey Allison following their fathers around the pits when they were just kids," Earles said.
Today's stock-car racing is a high-tech sport, with wind-tunnel testing and computer programs to analyze every second of an engine's performance. But many of the pioneers still can tell you in their own words how they fastened their doors with rope and wore leather helmets and T-shirts.
However, the legends won't be around forever. On Jan. 2, 87-year-old Anne B. France, the wife of NASCAR founder Bill France, died in Ormond Beach, Fla.
This is why Petty's 35th and final year is truly the end of an era.
When he came into the sport, the drivers still were digging up the sand of Daytona Beach in cars that literally could be bought off the showroom floor (or rented from a local car agency).
As he prepares to retire, the sport is a booming, multimillion industry, fueled by Fortune 500 company dollars and followed by some of the more rabid fans in sport. In stock-car racing, the recession is a mere annoyance.
Over the winter, NASCAR also survived a significant legal threat from racer Rick Baldwin's wife. Baldwin has been comatose since a 1986 crash at Michigan. His wife sought millions in damages from NASCAR, claiming it had shown a "conscious indifference" to the safety of drivers.
Last month, a jury in Corpus Christi, Texas, ruled in NASCAR's favor.
As 1992 gets under way, it "will probably be the longest year of my life," Petty said recently.
If so, it will be a switch from the past 34 years, which, in Petty's mind, seem to have flown by in the blink of an eye.
While Petty tends to his fan appreciation tour, the Winston Cup teams will be working so hard they barely will notice the time passing. And even for the successful, there is hardly time to enjoy the spoils.
In Charlotte, Davey Allison's team has been working late into the night trying to make cars that meet the stricter new body-style standards imposed by NASCAR's new technical director, Gary Nelson.
Nelson "has flat out put us to work this winter," crew chief Larry McReynolds said.
But that team probably would have been working on something else if it weren't for Nelson's body-work demands. As Allison said: "I think the reason a lot of teams will win races will be because they outworked the others."
In nearby Mooresville, N.C., Rusty Wallace's engine man, David Evans, has been putting in equally long hours trying to make the new Chevrolet cylinder heads powerful and reliable.
"We're happy with the power, just not happy with the reliability yet," Evans said.
And, as all the teams gather in Daytona Beach, Fla., for the season-opening Daytona 500 on Feb. 16, racing fans will salute "The King" while focusing most of their attention on what's happening at the front of the pack.
Dale Earnhardt is going to be there again this year, of course. Because of what he has done in the past two years, he has to be the front-runner to win his sixth championship and third in a row.
Earnhardt's stiffest challenge likely will come from Davey Allison and Ernie Irvan, although they may be joined (or replaced) by Mark Martin, Bill Elliott or Harry Gant.
However, knowing he has yet to win the Daytona 500 has to be annoying Earnhardt. And 1992 is not promising for him or his Chevrolet Lumina at Daytona.
After eight days of winter testing in December at Daytona International Speedway and 12 more days in January, the Fords, which have seen Chevrolets take the manufacturer's championship nine straight years, are blowing everything else off the track.
Elliott was fastest in winter testing at 193.340 mph. The fastest General Motors car, a Pontiac driven by Kyle Petty, was fifth-fastest overall - behind four Fords. The fastest Chevrolet, piloted by Irvan, the defending Daytona 500 champion, was 12th-fastest - behind 11 Fords and Petty's Pontiac. Irvan was more than 2 mph slower than Elliott.
It is hard to know whether this will have any bearing once Speedweeks begins. Winston Cup drivers and team members say winter practice doesn't mean a thing, but they also were talking all winter about how fast those Fords were.
Although the real howling hasn't been heard from the General Motors shops, Ford's stock-car racing chief, Lee Morse, already has decided - with a sharp sense of insecurity - that the best defense is a good offense.
"I'm concerned," he said in late January. "If we can compete and have stable-handling race cars, I'm going to be ecstatic. But I don't feel like that will be the case."
The new body shapes mandated by Nelson, which conform to the stock shape of the Ford Thunderbird and reverse the aerodynamic concessions NASCAR gave to Ford last year, may make the Fords hard to handle in traffic at Daytona, Morse said. At the other tracks, it could be the other way around.
This is what the General Motors teams are hoping for, even as they complain truthfully that the Fords are killing them on horsepower despite the new Chevrolet cylinder head.
Looks like an even playing field: powerful but ill-handling Fords versus underpowered but stable Chevrolets.
This year, as the fans pack the stands to see the next episodes of this long-running automotive soap opera, NASCAR could employ the newspaper adage: When everyone is unhappy, you know you're doing something right.
Keywords:
AUTO RACING