King Richard draws stares in New York, the bridge between the old boys who ran moonshine in souped-up stock cars and the super-rich new boys like Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, who maintain pieds-à-terre on the island of Manhattan.
“I’m old guard,” Petty said, 36 stories high, visiting the New York aerie of Nascar. “I stay at home. I don’t even carry a cellphone,” he said proudly, adding that he is also computer illiterate.
He turned 71 on July 2 but has learned a new trick — selling a majority of the family business, Petty Enterprises, to Boston Ventures, a private equity firm.
“It’s better to own 30 to 40 percent of something than 100 percent of nothing,” Petty declared. Perhaps he should have leaned out a window overlooking Park Avenue, imparting his country wisdom to speculators who were probably running their own corporations into the ground even as King Richard spoke.
“As I get older, as Kyle gets older, we don’t have our grandson here,” Petty said Wednesday. “This is something we’ve been talking about for four or five years,” he said of the new partnership. “This is for my family. That’s what happens to family businesses.”
Petty said the soaring price of gasoline is more of a problem for the fans who travel long distances than for the teams that drive hundreds of miles around the track.
“Nascar is at the mercy of the fans,” he said. “The fans are at the mercy of gasoline. Television ratings are up but attendance is down, so it works out. It gets so expensive.”
Does he have any answer for the economics of racing? “We usually go into a town on Thursday night,” he said. “We could cut back a day or two, go in Saturday, go back Sunday, but then we are cutting back on the people at the motels. There’s no simple answer.
“In the 1970s, when we had a fuel shortage, we looked it up,” Petty continued. “The New York Giants were using more gasoline to fly to California for a football game than we are for a 500-lap race. If we cut 10 percent, the gas companies would raise the price.”
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