Petty family has rich history at Richmond
By RICK MINTER
There have been 100 Cup races at Richmond International Raceway,

KYLE PETTY

and the track has seen one Petty after another pull off remarkable feats.

The late Lee Petty won the first Cup race at Richmond on April 19, 1953, and again in 1960.

His son, Richard Petty, leads all drivers in Richmond with 13 victories. He also has a series-high 34 top-fives and 41 top-10s in 63 career starts.

And Richard's son, Kyle, got his first Cup victory at Richmond in 1986 while driving the Wood Brothers' No. 21 Ford. In that race, he was running fifth when the top four drivers - Dale Earnhardt, Darrell Waltrip, Joe Ruttmann and Geoff Bodine - wrecked with two laps to go. Because he was the first through the wreckage, he won.

And there was Lee's victory in '53, which set the record for the fewest cars running at the finish at Richmond - one.

Published accounts of the race indicate that the track, then a dirt surface, was extremely rough, which led to an average race speed of 45.535 mph, the slowest ever.

"This was a fairgrounds race track, and they didn't really know how to prepare the racing surface for a 4,000-pound car that bounced around and stuff," Richard Petty explained recently. "When we first started racing with my dad, you had to finish. He took a six-cylinder Plymouth and won a bunch of races. It wasn't because he outran anybody because there was no way he was going to outrun a V-8 Oldsmobile, [but] he just kept running and running and running, and the wheels didn't fall off ours and they did off some of the rest of them." Petty said his father, who died in 2000,

was often conservative on the track, choosing to protect his equipment in an effort to earn a decent payday.

"He was known as 'Mr. Consistency,' " Petty said.

When Richard took over as the family's top driver after his father's injuries at Daytona in 1961, he was consistent, too, consistently out front and fast.

One of his more memorable victories came at Richmond.

"I got hit coming off the No. 4 corner, and I wound up halfway out of the racetrack," he said. "The car was up on top of the guardrail. The front end was headed back toward the track, but the back end was clean over the guardrail. When I got hit, it just jumped up there."

Lucky for him, there was a chain-link fence behind the guardrail. It acted like a springboard and catapulted his car back onto the track.

"That fence just threw the car back on the racetrack," he said. "I just grabbed second gear and kept going. I was clean out of the racetrack and still won the race."