CUP: Petty Was At Center Of Real ‘Feud’

Sprint Cup

CUP: Petty Was At Center Of Real ‘Feud’

Richard Petty still vividly recalls some of his early run-ins with Bobby Allison...

Mike Hembree | Posted August 24, 2010 Concord, NC

Richard Petty makes an appearance at Concord Motorsport Park in Concord, N.C., on Tuesday. (Photo: Mike Hembree, SPEED.com)

The NASCAR feuds of the 21st century wilt in comparison to what generally is considered the worst – or best, depending on your perspective – of all time.

That would be the titanic battles waged in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the established star of the era, Richard Petty, and his take-no-guff challenger, Bobby Allison.

Petty and Allison waged their war across a theater that included numerous NASCAR tracks, but they saved most of their big fireworks for short tracks like Martinsville and North Wilkesboro, where bumping and banging were accepted parts of the game. Petty and Allison elevated the bumping and banging to new levels, however, and their antics sold tickets for a host of promoters.

Before cooler heads prevailed and a truce was called, Petty and Allison crunched a string of race cars, set the table for fights among their team members and put so much fire under their fan bases that an alcohol-saturated Allison fan jumped into a victory lane to attack Petty. That effort was repelled by Richard’s brother, Maurice, who popped the intruder with his right fist.

“We were trying to knock each other out of the race and still win the race,” Petty said Tuesday. “Of all the feuds, I would imagine that’s the biggest. I’ve had run-ins with Cale [Yarborough] and Cale had run-ins with [Darrell] Waltrip.

“I was trying to win. He [Allison] was trying to win. We knew if we beat each other, we were going to win the race.”

The conflict finally ended in 1972, but it continues to make for good stories when Allison and Petty wind up in the same room.

“You meet and say, ‘We’ve got to stop this before we hurt ourselves or somebody else,’” Petty said. “That’s what we did. We sat down we day and said, ‘Man, we’re tearing up too much equipment.’ He was tearing up Junior’s [team owner Junior Johnson] equipment, and I was tearing up my own equipment. This has got to stop.

“We were fortunate we just crashed each other. But you’re going to get other people involved that are innocent. We called it to a halt and went on down the road.”

Petty, who has seen more than a few driver dustups in his long career in racing, said the current Brad Keselowski vs. Kyle Busch disagreement doesn’t qualify as a feud.

Richard Petty speaks with reporters while attending a Ford commercial shoot at Concord Motorsport Park Tuesday. (Photo: Mike Hembree, SPEED.com)

“It has to last a little while,” he said. “One battle here and five or six weeks later, there’s another little battle. That’s not a feud. A feud is where there are three or four races in a row, and they’re beating on each other.

“Keselowski and Denny Hamlin last year. He [Hamlin] said I’m going to get him, and he got him. That winds up being a feud. They really got at each other. But now, I don’t think Kyle is paying a whole lot of attention. I think it’s a one-sided feud from that standpoint.”

Petty, attending a Ford commercial shoot at Concord Motorsport Park Tuesday, said the Sprint Cup team he co-owns probably will run only two cars – those of AJ Allmendinger and Marcos Ambrose – next season “unless something falls out of the sky.”

He said Kenny Francis, crew chief for Kasey Kahne, who is leaving Richard Petty Motorsports at the end of the season, has not made a decision about his future with the team.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 28 years. He has written several books on NASCAR, including "NASCAR: The Definitive History of America's Sport" and "Then Tony Said To Junior: The Best NASCAR Stories Ever Told". He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.

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