Auto Racing: Boy with a Silver Spanner

A lot of things run in families besides blond hair and bad teeth. A bent for politics, for instance, or aft ear for music, or a genius for making money. Richard Petty, 30, of Level Cross, N.C., was born with a silver spanner wrench in his mouth.

Around the dirt and asphalt speed ways of the South, auto-racing fans still talk about his father, Lee Petty, who in 13 years on the stock-car circuit won 54 Grand National races—a record that few experts ever expected to see beaten. Papa Petty is now 53; he walks with a permanent limp, the souvenir of a day at Daytona, Fla., when his car hurtled through a guardrail at 155 m.p.h., soared 150 ft. through the air, landed upside down in a parking lot. Lee retired from racing in 1962, but he is still a familiar figure around the track. Last May he was in Darling ton, S.C., to watch Son Richard break his record by winning victory No. 55 of his career. And last week he was back in Darlington cheering from the pits as Richard won his 21st race of the year, the Southern 500, at a record speed of 130.4 m.p.h.

Call Me Richard. The “like father, like son” pattern goes only so far. Grizzled Lee Petty is a link to the old school of stock-car racers, the back-country leadfoots who learned their trade racing hot-rods around dusty country-fair horse tracks or outrunning revenooers on the South’s mountainous “white-lightning trails.” Richard Petty, who has been racing for money ever since he turned 21, belongs to the new school: the cool, engineer-minded youngsters who talk endlessly about “axle ratios” and “foot-pounds of torque” and bristle at any mention of the sport’s indecorous beginnings. “Why don’t people just forget about all that?” complains Petty, who answers to no nicknames (“If my mother wanted me called Dick, she would have named me Dick”), neither smokes nor drinks, shuns sportswriters, photographers and auto graph seekers, and insists: “If there is any glamour in this sport, I haven’t found it.”

The fans obviously disagree. Last year 1,500,000 of them turned out to watch 167 drivers compete for $1,045,545 in prize money on the Grand National circuit. and 65,000 were on hand for last week’s Southern 500. The cars they saw whipping through Darlington’s straightaways at speeds up to 155 m.p.h. were anything but stock. Hidden under the electric-blue hood of Petty’s Plymouth Belvedere GTX was a 426-cu.-in. “hemi-head” racing engine that generated 520 h.p. and burned gasoline at the rate of a gallon every three miles. The car’s exhaust system, brakes, ignition and suspension had all been rebuilt at the Petty garage in Level Cross. The interior was stripped to make way for roll bars and a special, high-backed racing seat. Finally, the doors were bolted shut, so that Petty had to wriggle in and out through the glassless driver’s window.

Mix It Up. To rival drivers, Petty is known as a “charger,” who likes to blast ahead, full-bore, from the start of a race, hoping opponents will overtax their engines trying to catch him. He is also an innovator; he invented the dangerous art of “drafting”—keeping his car practically on top of an opponent’s rear bumper, using the partial vacuum created by the other car as a tow, thus conserving his own engine and fuel. Unlike many drivers, who make a fetish of braking and shifting at precisely the same points each time around a track. Petty varies his routine: “I drive by feel,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll go into a corner a full car length farther than at other times before braking or shifting.” Last week, on Darlington’s narrow, 11-mile track, with its notoriously tight corners, Petty’s feel turned a race into a rout. Gunning into the lead at the start, he stayed there for all but 19 out of 364 laps, coasted to a five-lap victory that was worth $26,900 and boosted his 1967 winnings to $110,175—just $3,395 short of Fred Lorenzen’s all-time season record.