Richard Petty: The good old days weren't so good after all
Back in the day, Richard Petty dominated Martinsville Speedway, where he won 15 of his 200 career NASCAR Premier Series victories.
Nowhere else did Petty win more races than he did at Martinsville, which is only about 65 miles away from Petty's hometown of Level Cross, N.C.
But in the days Petty ruled the short tracks, NASCAR was a very different sport.
Take the 1970 Old Dominion 500 at Martinsville, for example. In that race, Petty led 480 of 500 laps to defeat fellow NASCAR Hall of Fame members Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough and Bobby Isaac.
But here's a truly mind-blowing stat: Just 10 cars finished that race.
Think about that: An entire NASCAR Premier Series race where just 10 drivers managed to keep running at the end.
Eight drivers failed to get even 10 laps completed before they fell out.
While some folks like to wax rhapsodic about the good old days, in truth, sometimes they weren't very good at all, something Petty acknowledged.
"It used to be that we had all kind of brake problems and rear end problems and all that, and half of the cars fell out of the race," Petty said Saturday morning at Martinsville. "Now they start the race and if they don't crash nobody has a problem."
And that's a good thing.
"The cars are so much better as far as being able to run a whole race," said Petty. "It used to be survival, but now they race each other. Even though we raced each other then, a lot of us didn't survive.
"Now, they don't worry that much about surviving. For the long part of the deal it makes a better race out of it because you've got more cars running at the end of the race racing against each other."
