Weekend That Was: M'ville

MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- It's story-telling time.

And who is better to tell a few tales than Kyle Petty, who made his 810th start at NASCAR's highest level of competition last Sunday in the Subway 500 at Martinsville Speedway?

Petty has been racing at the Cup level since 1979, when his father, Richard, won the last of his record seven driving championships. It was the same year Dale Earnhardt, who would go on to tie the elder Petty with seven title of his own, drove in his first Daytona 500.

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Jimmy Carter was the President of the United States, and presiding over a hostage crisis in Iran -- where a revolution had disrupted oil exports and driven up gasoline prices all over the world. In the U.S., gas prices jumped from a national average of 65 cents per gallon to nearly 90 cents in less than a year. Some feared it would soon cost more than $1 per gallon.

In other words, Petty has been racing for a while. And he found it fitting that he moved into fifth place on the all-time list for Cup starts at Martinsville, which has always been a favored track of the Petty family.

"I've been coming here so long ..." Petty said last weekend from the hauler of the No. 45 Dodge he currently drives for Petty Enterprises. "It's funny how it's worked out. I've missed a ton of races. I've just missed races in my life. And it's funny how missing those races made it all work out. I made my 800th start at Indy -- which is a big race for us. And now I'm moving into the top five at Martinsville.

"Martinsville has always been a special place for us."

He remembers coming to Martinsville as a kid, watching his daddy race. Well, sort of watching Richard race; many times young Kyle was off into other things.

He said he especially remembers the old scoreboard, which had to be manipulated manually. It was done so at a more leisurely pace than the sport could now tolerate.

"You physically had to change the scoreboard. There was a man who sat on a stool, and every 10 laps he would walk down and change the numbers," Petty recalled. "Then he would go back and sit down. Ten laps later, he would go back to the end of the scoreboard and change it again."

The scoreboard also had room for the top-five leaders in the race. And whenever it was over, Petty would stage a race of his own -- on foot -- with the sons of drivers David Pearson and Bobby Allison, or car owners Glen and Leonard Wood.

"We would run across the racetrack when the race was over, and we would put 43 on everything. We would climb up the steps and put 43 straight across the board. The scoreboard wasn't five feet off the ground," Petty said. "You'd stand around for a little while and then Larry and Ricky [Pearson] would put 21 on everything for the Wood Brothers. Or Davey [Allison] and those guys would run across and put 12 up for Bobby when he was driving the Coca-Cola Chevy in the early '70s, when we were 10 or 12 years old.

"It's cool because those are my memories of these places. Playing football in the infield. Hanging out in the infield. Watching the race, but at the same time taking in just all the little things like the Grandfather clock and the stuff that used to happen here that don't happen anymore. It's not that kind of sport anymore. It's great that you break a record or move into another place on a list. But those are the things that I remember most about a place like this." (Continued)