Grand National: The Autobiography of Richard Petty

Dust jacket notes: "Richard Petty is a preeminent figure in stock car racing, as his father, Lee, was before him. The Pettys have been in NASCAR from the start, and they have always dominated the sport, though never more so than today. Richard Petty, in the fiercely competitive world that has spawned such men as Junior Johnson, Curtis Turner, Fred Lorenzen, Cale Yarborough, and David Pearson, has won more money (over $1 million) and more races - more than twice as many, in fact - than any other race driver. At Darlington and Daytona, at Charlotte and Atlanta, at the little tracks and at the Superspeedways, the Petty-blue Plymouth #43 has sat on the pole and been first past the checkered flag with almost monotonous regularity. But Grand National is more than the story of winning races, or even of the nation's greatest family team: Lee, Maurice, and Richard himself. It is no mean tribute to their success and extraordinary talent that Chrysler Corporation, the only Detroit giant still to field a racing team, decided in 1970 to formalize what was already an accepted situation: in the future all Chrysler racing activities will be handled by Petty Engineering. And it is the story of NASCAR, hold from a participant's point of view, an account of political intrigue and planning that, in the end, pulled stock car racing, kicking and squealing, into the high pressure world of modern sports entertainment. In the process, drivers and team mechanics were introduced to the sort of facilities that led them to discover and make use of the engineering and racing techniques that Richard Petty has developed to a fine art. But mostly, of course, Grand National is the story of the boy from Randleman, North Carolina, who, growing up with grease under his fingernails, eventually decided to try driving for himself and went on to become not merely good but the best ever seen - without losing any of his modest friendliness in the process."