From the King to Kyle, the driver makes the difference

He had the first national sponsor, full manufacturer backing, and the greatest crew chief of his era. He drove unparalleled cars built by the sport's most successful team. But in dissecting the greatness of Richard Petty, on the way to 200 career race victories and seven series championships, one thing seems to always get overlooked -- the sheer, innate, indescribable talent embedded within the long limbs and cowboy hat-covered mind of the King.

It's an easy thing to do. After all, how do we -- especially those of us who only drive on freeways -- define talent behind the wheel? It's not something obvious, as it is when a baseball pitcher delivers a 95 mph fastball or basketball player throws down a tomahawk dunk. In almost every other sport, talent is something visible, something quantifiable, something we can point to as a tangible reason why one person is better than another. Yet in racing, talent is an invisible bundle of reaction speed and hand-eye coordination, of focus and nerve. It's hidden behind the body of a racecar and the fabric of a firesuit and the shell of a helmet. It becomes clear only in the results.

And because of that ethereal nature it becomes forgotten, taken for granted, replaced by conjecture or excuses that hold less air than a Goodyear cut down by debris. Jeff Gordon won his first three championships because of the wizardry of former crew chief Ray Evernham. Jimmie Johnson has back-to-back titles because of the genius of crew chief Chad Knaus. Kyle Busch has won a series-best six races this season because of the horsepower underneath his Toyota. Richard Petty became the most successful driver in NASCAR history because he was supplied the best of everything. The fact that these guys are just inherently better than most everybody else fails to enter the conversation.

Granted, this is a sport where a combination of human and mechanical factors must mesh seamlessly in order for race wins and championships to follow. Even the best drivers become relatively helpless when saddled with an unprepared crew chief, a slow pit crew, or a bad car. But with everything being equal and cars running within a few tenths of a second of one another, drivers make the difference. They do their best to play down that fact, thanking the sponsors and the crewmen and the guys back at the shop. They give credit to everyone but themselves in a nice, humble, but ultimately deceiving gesture.

A King is born

A career the greatest NASCAR has ever seen began one night 50 years ago on an unforgiving racetrack in South Carolina.

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• Video: Reflections of Petty

That's because this sport revolves around drivers like the earth revolves around the sun, and organizations sink or float on their ability or inability. The fortunes of two teams -- the No. 5 of Hendrick Motorsports and the No. 18 of Joe Gibbs Racing -- say it all. Both are relatively unchanged since last season, with one exception. Busch left the former, joined the latter, and their directions have been divergent ever since.

All of which brings us back to Petty, who will celebrate the 50th anniversary of his first NASCAR start -- a sixth-place effort in a convertible event in Columbia, S.C. -- this weekend when the Sprint Cup circuit competes at Chicagoland Speedway. It's been 16 years now since the King took his last competitive laps in the blue No. 43 car he made famous, more than 24 years since he last won a race. With each passing season, there are fewer and fewer who can remember firsthand the years when he was not just great, but dominant like no driver has been before or since. Many fans today see him only in his current role, as patriarch of a struggling race team. His accomplishments have been diluted by time.

"I've always thought it was sort of sad, knowing what Petty did and how good he was when he was younger, to see him in the last year of his tour riding around the racetrack, and people of the new era forming an opinion of somebody like him or Darrell Waltrip, not remembering how dern good they were in their prime," said NASCAR vice president Jim Hunter, who as a sportswriter chronicled much of Petty's younger career.

In an era of balanced cars and balanced competition, where being a half-second off the leader is incomprehensibly slow, Petty's achievements boggle the mind -- 27 wins in the 48-race season of 1967, 21 more in 1971, a winning percentage of .401 during that span. But then come the whispers, the same ones that suggest Gordon was a product of crew chief magic or Busch is a beneficiary of Toyota horsepower, and they lay out the theory that the King had 'em all beat before he ever slipped into the car. That he basically bought seven titles with Chrysler and STP money. That you could have put almost anybody in that No. 43, it had so little competition.

That premise is out there, like foul whiffs of a landfill in the wind. Mention it to Dale Inman, the crew chief for all seven of Petty's titles, and watch him turn red. "People who say that Richard won 200 races but he didn't have any competition are full of [bull]," he said. "You look at the top 50 best drivers that [NASCAR] picked, most of them are from that era. And we didn't always have factory help. They'd give you a car and fenders and stuff like that, but if we broke a spindle or we broke a ball joint, we'd go to the junkyard. If we had a Plymouth, we'd get a ball joint off a Chrysler that was bigger and make it work. The factories weren't doing that."

Petty didn't always have sponsors, he didn't always have factory help. He won 27 times before Chrysler's Hemi engine debuted in 1964, won 148 of his 200 career races before STP came on board in 1973. He competed in an economic atmosphere even more unpredictable than the one of today, a time when manufacturers dropped into and out of the sport and race distances were curtailed because of a fuel shortage. And through it all, he won -- before, during, and after the Hemi, before and during his STP sponsorship, in good times and bad. He won because he had grown up a mechanic and knew how to take care of a car over the course of a long race. He won because he was smarter than his twangy accent let on. He won without power steering and modern safety advances.

He won because, even in the best of equipment and the best of times, the talent of a driver still makes all the difference.

"The guys who had those big [victory] numbers next to their names were people who understood what it took to win these races then," said Buddy Baker, who won 19 races on NASCAR's premier circuit between 1967-83. "Somebody asked me one night, 'Did Richard Petty actually have that ability?' I said no, he got lucky 200 times. You figure it out."

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.