King of the Road II

In the rural South, where every filling station harbors a budding pit crew and every stop sign is a potential starting line for an impromptu drag race, auto racing is a way of life. At the drive-in hamburger stands, kids who first soloed on John Deere tractors fuss over their souped-up cars and talk endlessly about "axle ratios" and "camshaft durations." Their heroes are the stock-car drivers who ride the Grand National circuit, a highballing competition that first took hold in the 1950s. The king of the road then was Lee Petty, a lead-footed type who roared out of the hamlet of Level Cross, N.C., to set a seemingly unbreakable record of 54 victories in 14 years of racing.

Lee Petty, now 59, watches as his son Richard, 35, helps load one of their gleaming, newly handcrafted Dodges onto a trailer truck at their 60-acre Level Cross spread. Richard is heading for a Grand National race in North Wilkesboro, N.C. Following in his father's slipstream, he is a fireballing folk hero, the center of attention at the North Wilkesboro track. Inevitably, doting fans who have driven their pickup trucks and campers hundreds of miles to see Petty race, ask him which of his many records -750 victories over 15 years, $1,411,788 in prize money, four Grand National championships -he takes the most pride in. Richard, a lanky, rawboned dude, chomps his cheap cigar and says in his best potlikker drawl: "I guess in still bein' alive."

When Lee Petty first began driving stock cars, races were run on dusty county-fair tracks and dirt ovals. Purses amounted to a few hundred dollars. Many drivers of that era, folklore has it, learned their trade outrunning "revenooers" on mountainous "white-lightnin' trails," screeching through 180DEG "bootleg turns" without spilling a drop of moonshine. By the time of Papa Petty's retirement in 1962 -induced by a nasty 150-m.p.h. crackup that left him with a limp -the circuit was slightly more respectable and much more lucrative. Today, attracting more than 1,500,000 spectators a year to modern high-banked tracks, drivers pad their earnings by turning their cars into billboards on wheels. This year Richard Petty reaped a reported $500,000 for agreeing to paint the sides of his car STP red. Not a total sellout, he insisted that the top remain Petty blue.

Race day in North Wilkesboro dawns gray and sullen. Heavy rains have turned the red clay infield into an axle-deep quagmire. At noon, ten Petty crewmen, proud as Praetorian Guards, push his glittering racer down pit lane for inspection. At 1:20 p.m. Army skydivers flutter to a gooey landing in the infield. Then a preacher leads the drivers in prayer and the rhine-stoned Carolina Dogwood Festival Queen bestows a kiss on Driver Bobby Allison for winning the pole position. At 1:52 p.m. Petty, wearing a gold fireproof jumpsuit, wriggles through the glassless window in the driver's door, which, for safety reasons, is welded shut. At 2 p.m. the starter says, "Gentlemen, start your engines." The 30 drivers rev up their 500-h.p.-plus monsters, creating a thunder that pierces the cotton stuffed in drivers' ears. After two laps, the pace car pulls away, the flag is dropped and the race is on.

Once a simple rural retreat where Lee Petty used to work on his cars in a converted reaper shed, the Petty spread in Level Cross is now a sprawling complex of machine and body shops, engine-building rooms, parts departments, warehouses and offices. Brother Maurice, who lives across the road from Daddy and Richard, is the chief mechanic of Petty Enterprises Inc.; First Cousin Dale Inman is the crew chief. The cars that the 35 Petty workers turn out are anything but stock. Everything from frames and brakes to transmissions and exhaust systems is handtooled. A team of four mechanics takes two weeks to build an engine, each one painstakingly tuned to meet the specific demands of different tracks. The end products are so prized that some professional drivers buy their stock cars from Petty. The going price: $30,000. Petty Enterprises grossed slightly more than $1,000,000 last year; Richard's purses contributed one-fourth of that.

Petty, starting in the No. 2 slot, challenges Allison on the very first turn of the five-eighths-of-a-mile course. The sellout crowd roars in anticipation of a repeat of last year's race when Petty waged a long fender-crashing duel with Allison before pulling ahead to win in the final laps. But Petty, a "charger" who likes to "drive the way I feel it," plays it crafty. Instead of "drafting" -a risky tactic Petty invented, in which he practically sits on an opponent's tail pipe, using the partial vacuum created by the lead car as a fuel-and engine-conserving tow -he hangs on Allison's flank and then passes him on the outside. When Allison regains the lead, Petty cuts inside and roars ahead for good on the eleventh lap. Aided by a crack pit crew who wipe his windshield, give him a drink of water, change the tires and fuel the car in 17 seconds, Petty coasts to his 151st victory by a four-lap margin.

A few hours after the race, Petty's car was back at Level Cross, where it was stripped down while another identical model was being totally rebuilt for this week's Rebel 500 at Darlington, S.C. As the mechanics worked, some of the 3,000 car buffs who tour Petty Enterprises each year looked on. Like pilgrims at a shrine, they inspected the last remnants of Papa Petty's old reaper shed and then repaired to a souvenir stand where they stocked up on Petty postcards, Petty T shirts, Petty racing jackets and Petty plaques. King Richard himself, wearing wraparound sunglasses and stroking his new Fu Manchu mustache, put in an appearance. Why, someone asked, had he bothered to compete in the North Wilkesboro race, a relatively minor event that some drivers bypassed because of the middling $4,730 winner's purse? "If there is something going on that involves wheels and I'm not part of it," he said, "well, I sort of feel cheated."

Meanwhile, as if to ensure that Level Cross will not be cheated out of a worthy successor, the Petty children were busily racing up and down the driveway in miniature gas-powered cars.

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