Richard Petty relives the very first Southern 500 from 1950 and what makes Darlington Raceway a jewel on the NASCAR schedule.
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00There was very few tracks around that were just racetracks.
00:12None of these guys had ever seen anything besides, say, a mild dirt track.
00:19Most of them were at fairgrounds or something like that.
00:24That's what all the racing was done at that particular time.
00:28Going to Darlington was sort of like it was the first time I went to Daytona.
00:33Never seen anything like this, man.
00:39Even though it was, what, a mile and a quarter or something like that,
00:43it was so much bigger than anything we'd ever seen.
00:48Darlington was our Super Bowl, Kentucky Derby.
00:52I mean, it was the biggest thing that happened in racing.
00:58The idea of having a 500-mile race was unheard of.
01:06People didn't know about pit stops.
01:08I don't even remember how we had enough gas to run 500 miles.
01:12They probably had to stop once to get it.
01:17I was so young, I really wasn't involved in the racing part of it.
01:22My dad was doing his thing.
01:25During the race, some of the cars in the infield didn't have wheels and tires
01:30because people would run out on the racetrack, and they'd run out of tires.
01:34They'd go in the infield, and they would just stock wheels instead.
01:38So they'd take them off of a Cadillac or a Ford or a Chevrolet or whatever
01:42and take them, put them on.
01:44I don't know if they stole them or if the car was just sitting there.
01:48They just took the tires.
01:50The reason the guy wanted to race was he had better tires than anybody else.
01:55So he didn't outrun nobody, he outlasted everybody.
02:05At that time, it was just another racetrack, even though it was bigger and all that.
02:10Everybody looked at Darlington as being the pinnacle of stock car racing.
02:17It took three or four years for Daytona to outshine Darlington.
02:25It wasn't just a southern thing.
02:27It got out everywhere else, I don't know.
02:31It opened up a whole different world to what the Cup was capable of doing.
02:47www.rimbaracer.com