NASCAR WCUP: Richard Petty expresses feelings on loss of grandson, Adam Petty
26 May 2000
Posted By Terry CallahanMotorsports Editor, The Auto Channel
THOUGHTS FROM RICHARD PETTY, PETTY ENTERPRISES, ON THE PASSING OF HIS GRANDSON, ADAM PETTY
(WHERE HAS THE PETTY FAMILY HAS SPENT THE PAST WEEK?) "We had the funeral on Monday. Everybody sort of hung around the house. Lynda and myself went to Wyoming on Thursday. Then Friday Kyle and Montgomery Lee and Pattie and them went to a horse show down in the eastern part of the state. We just sort of tried to get away from all the racing stuff and just sort of slow down a little bit."
(HOW IS EVERYBODY IN THE FAMILY COPING?) "Everybody seems to be doing real good. It's like everything else. I know everybody has been through in from time-to-time. As long as everybody stays busy everything's going good. Kyle has been real, real busy trying to put everything else together. Pattie has done real good, I think. Linda gets a little emotional every once in a while. Montgomery Lee has done really good because she was able to go and get back with the horses and stuff. Austin has just been busy. He's been busy with the girls, so he's OK."
(ON HOW HE IS DOING) "I sort of go with the flow. It's tough losing anybody in your family. I just lost my father about six or eight weeks ago. We're still dealing into that with my mother, and then all this other happens. After you get to be 62 years old you sort of go with the flow, and that's what we've been doing."
(HAS THIS TRAGEDY SOURED HIM AT ALL ON RACING?) "Oh no. I tell the tale that I was sitting Monday evening and really felt bad. I said, 'You know, if I hadn't been in racing and hadn't pushed Kyle, stayed working with Kyle, hadn't working with Adam -- maybe this wouldn't have happened.' Then I read in the paper - first thing I done Monday night when I picked up the paper - a boy, 17, and one, 15, both drowned, different places just swimming, just having fun. So that just lifted a cloud off of me from that standpoint."
(ON THE FUTURE OF PETTY ENTERPRISES) "Petty Enterprises is going to go on. Right now we're just re-evaluating everything we had because as everybody knows, we were putting a lot of future and a lot of things in the basket with Adam to sort of carry the torch for us. So now we just have to re-evaluate everything. So from that standpoint it will be a little bit of time before we get that figured out. When we do, we'll let everybody know what is going on."
(DOES KYLE WANT TO GET BACK TO RACING) "Yeah, I think he does. I think was just a little too quick for him. I think he needs to sort of settle down. Plus, the business part of it, the family part - all that stuff just thrown in on him at one time - I think he said, 'OK, just sort of take a week off here,' and try to sort of get that stuff together so that he could go forward with it. Yeah, he'll be ready for next week."
(IS RICHARD GOING TO RETURN TO A MORE ACTIVE ROLE WITH THE TEAM NOW?) "Well, I ain't went no where. I've just been putting Kyle out in front of me. You know what I mean? Really if you talk to one of us you get the same answer as if you're talking to the other, so there's not a whole lot of difference there."
(HOW DOES HE WANT ADAM TO BE REMEMBERED) "That's a good question. I think that you see very few 19-year-old kids that have touched as many people as what Adam has. I think he was too young for anybody to really evaluate what his career was going to be from the professional standpoint. But I think the majority of the people that have ever met him remember his smile, the patting on the back, that he'd joke with them or whatever. So I guess that's probably the best memory that anybody could ever have of anybody is that, hey, he was a pretty good kid and always seemed to get along with everybody. That's how I'm going to remember him anyway."
(WILL KYLE FOCUS MORE NOW ON HIS TEAM?) "It's really hard to say. Yeah, I think he'll go back to his career a little bit more now from that standpoint. But he's still got a pretty big operation with Petty Enterprises. It's just according to how he wants to split it up. I think from the driving standpoint once he gets back in and gets to going, then he'll probably be more determined than ever to prove a point, more or less."
(DOES RICHARD'S GRANDSON AUSTIN PETTY HAVE ANY ASPIRATIONS TO RACE?) "We don't think Austin has. He ran some of the 'sporty' car stuff last year a little bit and stuff. He's 17 years old and every time you see him he's got a different career, so he hasn't settled anything. But as far as being a race car driver, I don't think that's ever even in his wildest dreams."
(DID KYLE EVER CONSIDER NOT RETURNING TO RACING?) "I don't think so. If he did, he didn't express to any of the family or any of that stuff. It was just a deal sort of like what I said a while ago. It's just, 'Hey, this is life.' We got to checking, talking to different people in the shop and there were five or six people in the shop that had lost kids that we didn't even know about. Maybe they lost them before they went to work with us, or whatever. So it's not an isolated deal. Racing's got nothing to do with it. It was his time and he 's not here with us no more."
(HOW DOES IT FEEL TO HAVE TO TALK ABOUT IT SO MUCH?) "Well, really I would just rather everybody forget about it - just have their good memories and then go on down the road. That's what we're trying to do. Everybody that has talked to us or wrote letters, you all have talked to us, and whatever - the sympathy has been great, and we appreciate that. Everybody knows there is nothing we can do and nothing y'all can do. But we do appreciate that part."
(HAS THIS BROUGHT THE FAMILY CLOSER TOGETHER?) "I don't know that this will bring the family any closer together. We felt like we were a pretty close family anyway. We're not looking at racing any different. We went out and ran Saturday night. John (Andretti) ran into the wall and totaled a brand new car out. That car was tore up worse than Adam's car, and John is fine. You know what I mean? So we just look at it that part of living is dying, and he just got there a little bit earlier than what we wanted him to do."
(ON THE FUTURE OF THE RACE TEAM) "Right now we don't have any particular plans. That's where Kyle is at today. He is working with people. We don't know, but we're going to go forward - let's put it that way. One person is not going to stop the world and it's not going to stop Petty Enterprises either. What we do in the future, like I said a while ago, is that once we decide what we're going to do and how we're going to operate, then we'll let everybody know."
(IS KYLE CONSIDERING DRIVING THE PETTY ENTERPRISES BUSCH SERIES ENTRY NEXT WEEK AT DOVER?) "You would have to talk to him about that. We don't know. They are going to have to see. Really that's going to be more up to probably what Sprint wants to do, how they want to handle their PR part of it. Right now, I would doubt it. But you can never tell."
(DOES ANYTHING ABOUT THE PUBLIC'S REACTION TO ADAM'S DEATH STAND OUT?) "No, not really. It's just a deal where I guess there were a lot more people that knew Adam than what I thought. We've had letters from all around the world and calls from around the world. These people had actually met Adam. They didn't just know Lee Petty or Richard Petty or Kyle Petty. They knew Adam Petty. So again, he stood out a little bit further than what I thought he was."
(DO THEY KNOW WHAT CAUSED THE ACCIDENT?) "No, we don't know. We think the accelerator hung. That's what all the observers and that's what everybody seems to think happened because of the speed that was carried into the middle of the corner."
(DO THEY REALLY WANT TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED?) "Coming from the Petty crowd, we don't want to know. We don't care. I mean, if it was something that we could have prevented, it would have already been prevented, I guess. No matter what you find out it doesn't change the outcome. If it was something that we could prevent the next time, then yeah, you'd like to know from that standpoint. But other than that, it's irrelevant."
(WITH AUSTIN NOT INTERESTED IN RACING, WHO WILL BE THE HEIR TO THE PETTY OPERATION NOW?) "I don't see none of the girls really coming along driving, you know what I mean? Hopefully not, anyway. But that's really not a concern. Racing went on without the Pettys. It will go on after the Pettys. The Pettys have to make a living somewhere and racing is what they know, and that's what they're going to be doing."
(IS PETTY ENTERPRISES STAYING IN RACING IN MEMORY OF ADAM? "No, no. We've got to make a living, man. It's sort of like a farmer. Just because he has a drought one year, he plants again next year. We do the same thing."
(HAS HE TALKED TO BOBBY ALLISON AT ALL DURING THIS PERIOD?) "Yeah I talked to Bobby a little. He came to the funeral home, him and Judy. It's the first time I've seen them together all these years. They came together and then they came over to the farm when the memorial service was over, and I got to talk to him a little bit. Naturally, of all the people that I know that knows how our family feels, it's Bobby Allison. I felt for him when he had his tragedy and I probably feel more for him now than what I did then because I went through the same thing, and our families went through the same thing."
(ON STEVE GRISSOM FILLING IN THIS WEEK FOR KYLE) "That was an automatic deal. Fortunately for Petty Enterprises there wasn't a truck race this week. We've already worked with Steve and he understands the systems and all this kind of stuff. So it was a natural to put him in Kyle's car when Kyle decided not to run. If we hadn't had Steve, we probably wouldn't have even run the car at all. He is just filling on in and trying to make it work from there."
Text provided by Al Larsen
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