'Back to our roots' at Bristol and Darlington

By Richard Petty, Special to Turner Sports Interactive
August 29, 2001
11:44 AM EDT (1544 GMT)

According to some folks, we've gotten "back to our roots" these past two weeks.

Richard Petty

Yeah, we raced 500 laps at Bristol, the half-mile track up in the mountains of Tennessee this past week -- a short track race, our first one of those since we were at Richmond in May. This coming week we're at Darlington, an egg-shaped track in the hottest part of South Carolina that we've been racing at since 1950.

Well, I remember our "roots" and they didn't look anything like Bristol Motor Speedway or Darlington Raceway.

We ran on small dirt tracks and really short paved tracks all over the country. In the early 1950s, a crowd of a few thousand at a small track somewhere in Pennsylvania was pretty good. More than likely, we were racing on a Friday night, and had another race Saturday night.

There weren't any qualifying engines and your race engine you usually just fixed up a little bit and got it ready to go again the next day.

The track tower at Darlington Raceway.

There was a track in New Jersey that was a one-fifth mile. They would start some 50 or 60 cars on the thing and by the time the cars starting at the end took the green flag, they were already two laps down.

The track was crowded and you spent the whole race just shoving people out of the way. But the fans loved it, and they always turned out.

I didn't bring that up just so I could tell you about the good ol' days. It was more to give you a comparison as to what it was like back then.

Forty-three cars at Bristol makes for a pretty crowded track too, but these 43 seem to fit a whole lot better. At Darlington, it seems sometimes that two cars at the same place at the same time is way too many.

Take Bristol, for example. The track is just over half a mile (.533) and is the most steeply-banked one we run on. Even Talladega, which is our longest track, isn't banked as much. Talladega is 33 degrees and Bristol is 35 degrees. It takes about 15 seconds to turn one lap at Bristol, and it feels like you are in the turns the whole time. You turn left, turn left, breathe in…turn left, turn left, breathe out. That's one lap.

The towering stands of Bristol Motor Speedway.

When you stand in the middle of the infield at Bristol it's like being in a small city. The banks are higher than the infield, and then the grandstands go forever into the sky. Those things are easily five or six stories tall, and they are jam-packed when the race starts. Those folks are loud too. It's one of the few tracks where you can almost always hear the roar of the crowd over the roar of the engine.

What makes Bristol so popular? Well, it comes down to the fact that the racing is almost always close. It has to stay close because of all of the cautions.

You run for awhile, somebody runs into trouble, and you go a couple of laps under caution. About the only thing you know for sure at Bristol is that it's not going to turn into a fuel-mileage race.

Why all the cautions? Simple. When you are turning 15 second laps, things happen in a hurry. If you have a problem, you'd better catch it quick or that wall comes up on you fast. If the car in front of you has a problem, you only miss it by luck. If the car 10 cars in front of you has a problem, you're still going to have to react quickly to avoid it.

Bristol under the lights.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen drivers watch a wreck at Bristol in their rearview mirror and it still be going on when they come back around.

That all makes for a heck of a race.

And that's not lost on the fans. Some 125,000 people packed in this high-banked half-mile that uses concrete instead of asphalt because the cars pound into the turns so hard. The purse is around $2 million and a national television audience will be watching.

I remember our roots, but I don't remember anything like that.