Only Yesterday: Kyle Petty, Underrated?

So, just to be clear before into diving into this topic, no. Kyle Petty was not the best driver in NASCAR history.

He also wasn’t the worst driver either, but you’d be excused for not knowing that. Whenever somebody brings up a list of worst NASCAR drivers or there are debates online, Petty’s name is often thrown out there with names such as Danica Patrick, Mike Borkowski, Nur Ali, the Cope twins, etc.

Those drivers, in reality, are not in the same league as the son of Richard Petty.

In order to get a full perspective on Kyle Petty’s career, it might be easiest to divide it into three parts: the beginning, middle, and end. Obviously, this can be done for any driver in history. But the reality is that nobody else’s NASCAR Cup Series career really can be divided into such obvious extremes.

In 1979, Petty’s career began with a win in the ARCA Menards Series race at Daytona International Speedway. Yes, this was his very first competitive race of any kind, not even having a late model start prior to his big debut. The reasoning behind this was simple: There was a belief that NASCAR would eventually simply do away with short tracks as the sport grew, so what was the point of spending that time developing a driver on short tracks if most of their career would be on big tracks? At least, this was the thinking of Richard Petty at the time, who made this particular call about his son’s career.

This quote from “The King,” from Mark Bechtel’s book He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back, explains the thought process here in full:

“Here’s the way I’m looking at it,” Richard explained. “If a man’s got 20 years of experience on short tracks, makes no difference.

“When he gets to Daytona, he’s a rookie. He’s got to learn about running 180 to 190 miles per hour. He’s got to learn about drafting. He’s got to learn about crosswinds. What he has learned on a half-mile dirt or a quarter-mile asphalt [track] is good for nothing. And the future of [Cup] racing is the superspeedways. That’s where the money is. That’s where the television’s going to be. That’s where the sponsors want to be. And that’s where you want to be.”

This plan came to full fruition in August of that very year, where 19-year-old Kyle Petty made his very first Cup start at Talladega Superspeedway. Today, NASCAR would never allow anything like this to happen, even if the driver was theoretically quite literally the “Prince of NASCAR.” Incredibly,…