Richard Petty remembers stepping through the tunnel to the infield at Daytona International Speedway for the first time and feeling like the rookie he was.
It was February 1959. Petty was only 21 years old. He’d watched his father, Lee, race a bunch at Darlington Raceway, home of NASCAR’s biggest race at the time, but Darlington didn’t have such high-banking turns and long straightaways.
“It looked so humongous for a 21-year-old kid to see,” Petty said Tuesday. “And I know it was for the pros, too, the guys who had already been racing.”
