In this episode of 'Shift,' Richard Petty recalls memories of his dad, Lee Petty and his first race in Charlotte in 1949.
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00:00This is where it all started, right here.
00:07We started in this reaper shed, which moved the tractors out back and moved the race car
00:13in.
00:14I think in 59 we built some more, and we've still been building ever since.
00:23My dad had a 37 Plymouth, I think, and it had a straight-eight Buick motor in it with
00:29two carburetors.
00:30They'd probably run 110 miles an hour or whatever, but it was the fastest thing around.
00:37There was a place up above Greensboro and one down below Ashburth that was a long stretch,
00:44probably 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, nobody on the road, and they'd race up and down the
00:49road.
00:51Anytime that Lee Petty was going to race, then he got out.
00:56You didn't have the internet, you didn't have telephones.
01:00How that word got around, I don't know.
01:03You had people lined up down the road, so people come from all around just to watch
01:08them run.
01:09Just go, poof, and that was it, you know.
01:13Could you have ever, at 11 years old, thought that he was going to be a race car driver?
01:19It was a whole different world to me.
01:21Well, when we was growing up here, we was just plain old country boys.
01:25I mean, we lived on a dirt road, we didn't have running water, we didn't have electricity.
01:30They read in the paper that Bill France was going to have a stock car race in Charlotte.
01:41So all of a sudden, we were going somewhere.
01:44That was the first time I'd ever been to Charlotte.
01:48When they did start racing, the whole world opened up.
01:52I remember we stood in the pit area, or in the infield.
01:58There was a lot of people there.
02:03If people had a new car, it was a big deal.
02:06A couple of guys up there had a 46 Beauty.
02:09It was really fast.
02:11At that time, it was probably one of the fastest cars around on the road.
02:15So somehow or another, Lee Petty talked him into letting him borrow the car.
02:20For some reason, Petty talked him into it.
02:25The big deal was to see a car that's run up and down the road sit on a racetrack.
02:30So a lot of people come just, I guess, just out of curiosity more than anything else.
02:37We won the championship out of this shop in 1954.
02:42Lee Petty won 54 races.
02:45Almost half of them came out of this one-room shack.
02:53This is where it was all done.