Records outlive careers
With less incentive to stay around until middle age, modern drivers have little chance of erasing legends.
By BRANT JAMES
Published February 18, 2005
DAYTONA BEACH - Most don't refer to the mustachioed man in the cowboy hat by his given name. It's not Richard Petty, Rich or "Mister."
It's King. It has been that way since about 1967, when he surpassed his father, Lee, as NASCAR's all-time wins leader. He kept heaping on the wins for almost two more decades and drove another quarter of a century. He's extremely likely to keep the record forever.
Of course, Babe Ruth used to think the same thing. His record of 714 home runs was going to stand forever. But he was wrong.
Petty smiles behind wide, dark sunglasses with much greater confidence. With good reason.
Numbers are regarded with the same reverence in stock-car racing as any other sport. Baseball has 755, the home run record Hank Aaron established before retiring in 1976. NASCAR has 200, Petty's all-time win record. His seven championships were equalled just once, by the late Dale Earnhardt.
But racing's landscape evolves more quickly than any other sport. Technology improves athletes and equipment in every game, but fundamental changes to racing are likely to secure old-time racers like Petty into an untouchable realm. The changing demographics of NASCAR, where drivers enter younger, and can leave earlier, richer and healthier also is rendering obsolete the notion that records are made to be broken.
Jeff Gordon is the best his generation can offer in assaulting Mount Petty. His 69 wins and four championships have separated him from his peers in 13 years in NASCAR's top series.
But Gordon has been coy regarding his chances of threatening either of Petty's milestones, even while winning his titles between 1995 and 2001. But after finishing third - by 16 points - to champion Kurt Busch last season, Gordon is more enthusiastic about the subject. This year, he said, everything seems right.
"Now it's "Drive for Five in '05' and maybe this will be the year that we'll get it," said Gordon, who finished third in the finale at Homestead but was in position at various times in the race to win the title.
The new Chase for the Championship format adopted last season could increase his chances to reach seven titles, though the new system cost him a title last year (he would have won undeer the old rules).
No longer does a driver need a perfect season; just be top 10 in points in the first 26 races and have a hot 10-race finish.
"(After Homestead) I started thinking about the points system and our chances to win," said Gordon, 33. "One of the things I've opened my eyes to, had the points not changed, our chances to win championships would be every few years. I feel that with the points we could win every single year.
"I say that because our team is very good about being in the top 10. I'm getting a little arrogant by saying that, but I think we're going to be in the top 10 more consistently than a lot of teams out there. We're going to have many chances if the points stay the same way."
He has finished in the top 10 in all but his first full season. Though he can now think about seven titles, the wins record is beyond the scope of imagination. So is comparing drivers from different eras, moreso than in other sports. Baseball's pitching can be diluted by expansion, affected by smaller ballparks and steroid-addled hitters, but in the end, one man's fastball can transcend an era. Walter Johnson would likely be a very nasty customer in 2005.
A semi-accurate comparison of skill between Petty and Gordon is virtually impossible, however.
Gordon is NASCAR's active wins leader, but needed 13 seasons to reach 69. Petty won 200 times in 1,186 races over 35 seasons, or 16 percent. Gordon is also at 16 percent in 409 starts. So all he has to do is keep up the pace ... for another 22 seasons, to age 55.
Gordon won't rule out a run for the records, but he said he won't subject himself to a crawl for them as an older driver.
"If it was doable," he said. "There are a lot of ifs, ands and buts there. If we had seven championships and things are still going well....I want to stay in this sport as long as I'm healthy and competitive and I'm enjoying what I'm doing. It has nothing to do with numbers. But if I just came off of winning seven championships, I'd probably want to go try for that eighth one.
"Now I'm sitting at 69 wins and I would love to get to 70. But if things aren't going well, and I don't think I'm going to have a chance at getting 70, then I'm not going to keep trying just so I can get to that number."
Darrell Waltrip, the modern era wins leader (84) feels his place in the NASCAR record book is tenuous, no matter how long Gordon stays in the sport.
"Obviously that is going to go down," said Waltrip, a self-described "statistics guy." "Jeff Gordon's going to do that in the next couple of years."
But NASCAR's growth from a disjointed, four-day-a-week traveling circus in the '50s and '60s to a super-organized, super-sanctioned 36-event league has secured 200 wins in a time capsule. Aside from having more races, the best in Petty's heyday had to watch four or five key foes - Cale Yarborough, Joe Weatherly, Junior Johnson, etc., depending on the year - and hope to avoid the rabble around bullrings like ones at Weaverville and Hickory, N.C.
"You look at Richard's 200 wins, but that was accomplished when you could win 20-25 times in a season and that's not going to happen anymore," Waltrip said. "It's hard to compare apples to apples here. If you look at the numbers, you can say no one is ever going to win 200 races, but if you look at the quality of those 200 Richard won, some of them were 100-lappers, some of them were 100 -milers. Sometimes he won five races in one weekend: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and he'd win all of them because he was going somewhere where no one else was."
Petty isn't about to apologize for dominating his era, though he raced no fewer than 44 times a season - 62 times in 1964 - from 1959-71, when he won 140 times. (Not since 1971 has NASCAR's top series run more than 36 races.) But he concedes modern drivers face a greater quantity of competition.
"Jeff's the active win leader now," he said, "but he's not going to stay around long enough to make that work. It's percentages. They're going to have to win a bigger percentage than we did because there is less races and it's not likely to happen because of the competition."
And the span of a NASCAR career. Technology has made racing safer than ever - but the sport's popularity boom has made it easier to make a fabulous living and segue into ownership or other pursuits.
"When NASCAR first started running, drivers like Fred Lorenzen, Ned Jarrett, Junior Johnson, they retired at 34-35 years old because that's what all the rest of the athletes did," Petty said. "Then the next crowd comes along and they all last to 40 or 50. The big crowd in the middle with Darrell, me, Earnhardt, (David) Pearson, Cale, all those guys pushed the scale up. Now the scale is going to start going downhill because in 10 years they make $50-million. So you say, "Why should they do that?' They won't."
Brian Vickers won the Busch Series title in 2003 at age 20, the youngest to win one of NASCAR's top three circuits. He could race for decades with the right mix of luck, talent and resources from his well-heeled Hendrick Motorsports team. But after his first Nextel Cup season last year - finishing 25th in points - and all the on- and off-track demands, he's not sure he wants that anymore.
"Only time will tell," Vickers said. "Personally, I race as long as I enjoy it, whether its 10, 15, 20 years. Some days I feel like, "Man, I want to have a great career for 10 years and be gone' and sometimes I want to race for 25 years. It depends on what goes on that day. It's just mentally and physically a lot different than it used to be."
The idea of getting in and out fast does not appeal to Martin Truex Jr., who rose from the Busch North Series to win a Busch Series title last year.
"The No.1 thing that brings you to this sport is having a passion for the sport and that's all you've ever known and wanted to do," said Truex, 24, who has made two Nextel Cup starts. "To think like that, there's a lot of people who would deserve this opportunity more if that's why you were out there."
That's the kind of attitude that has perpetuated one of NASCAR's most impressive records, one that is now arguably more iron-clad than 200 wins and seven titles. Ricky Rudd, 48, will make his 753rd consecutive start Sunday in the Daytona 500, a streak dating to a Jan.11, 1981 start at the now-defunct Riverside International Raceway.
Rudd escaped injury during a violent flip at Daytona in 1984 and drove with torn ligaments in his leg after hitting the wall in the 1988 Winston. When doctors in Charlotte told Rudd he needed surgery that would steal six weeks of his season, team owner Kenny Bernstein flew him to Indianapolis, where an orthopedist opted for an aggressive rehabilitation program that allowed him to keep competing.
Rudd's latest, closest call came last fall in Atlanta when he required the last provisional to make the field. A new rule guaranteeing starting spots to the top 35 teams in owner points is likely to make retirement or dismissal from Wood Brothers Racing - which team co-owner Ed Wood says won't happen - the only forces capable of ending the streak soon. The next-longest active streak is 661 by Rusty Wallace, who will retire after this season.
Rudd said he was more proud to be the first driver/owner to win the Brickyard 400, but he thinks the mark will endure.
"The trend of things today, the race schedule today, and not so much the race schedule but the PR schedule that goes along with it, test schedule, your time away from home is a lot," he said. "Even years ago, when we worked on our own equipment, the time away from home wasn't as much. I don't see how people will be able to raise their family on the road, to make the commitment it takes. They'll put it off until they're 28 or 29 and then retire."
Waltrip, for one, isn't willing to accept that all of the watershed marks are beyond reach. Maybe its the stathead in him. Maybe he sees something transcendent in Gordon.
"Jeff (Gordon) will (win seven titles)," he said. "If he wins this year, he will be only two away. He himself, if you take the total package - every racetrack we go to, every situation you can put him in, he's probably by far the best. He's backed with incredible resources, with good people and that will be tough to overcome any time soon."
But so are the records he is chasing.