Nearly every race fan knows the story of the 1979 Daytona 500. Many believe it’s the race that put NASCAR on the map.
With a record television audience partially because a large snowstorm had socked in most of the Eastern half of the country, Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough were racing to the checkered flag when they tangled entering the third turn. The pair crashed and ended up fighting in the infield with Allison’s brother Bobby joining in.
That’s what most of the country remembers. A few don’t even know that Richard Petty held off Darrell Waltrip and A.J. Foyt for his sixth of seven Daytona 500 triumphs.
Petty’s son, Kyle, now a veteran driver and the CEO of Petty Enterprises, remembers 1979, not as much for the famous fight, but for what the Pettys had to overcome to get to victory lane.
Petty said it was one of the few years during the first quarter century of the Great American Race when he didn’t go to Daytona expecting a Petty car to triumph.
“When we were young until the mid-70s, until I was 15 or 16 years old, I never thought about going to Daytona and Richard Petty not winning the race,” Petty explained. “You prepared all winter long and you went down there and won the race. That is the way it was.”
But 1979 was different.

“When he won in ’79, that was huge for me,” Petty continued. “The two big wins when I look at everything for me, was him winning in ’79 because that was one of the first times I was ever involved in building a race car from the ground up and he drove it. And then Adam (Kyle’s late son) winning the ARCA race at Charlotte. Those are my two best memories in this sport. They are not my wins, but I was a big part of both of those wins.”
But while the Pettys were stock-car racing’s powerhouse through the ’60s and ’70s, hard times had hit the Petty team during 1978 and the outlook for the new season was bleak.
“In ’79, we were out of money,” Petty explained. “If you go back and look at the pictures from 1979, you will notice there is not a huge STP on the hood of that car and on the quarter panels there is a company known as Southern Pride. That is a local car wash because we had to find funding elsewhere.
“STP came off in 1978 when we had a terrible year with the Dodge and switched to Chevy.”
While Petty remembered his Dad wanted to go back to Dodge for 1979, he acknowledged the Dodge car of the time was not competitive. Thus, they went another route.
“We ended up building an Oldsmobile to go down there,” Petty explained. “We didn’t have a lot of employees. We had to lay some guys off because we didn’t have a lot of money and we were running a little lean. It was myself and Richie Barnes and Steve Hmiel, we were the only guys that worked on the car and hung the body.
“I was going to school. I would go to school and then come home and work on the car. We worked a lot of hours on that car and then Dale (Inman) worked on it and we went to Daytona and everything started to fall our way.
“Goofy things happened all week. I won the ARCA race (his first major stock-car event), my grandfather won a golf tournament and then you come down to the end of the race and you think you are going to run third and you end up winning the race.”
There were no televisions in the pits in 1979. It was the first year of live flag-to-flag coverage on CBS, and Petty said there was very little to see from pit lane.
“You didn’t see anything back then,” he said. “It is hard for people to believe, but everybody just stood on pit road. That was before insurance and they made you get off of pit wall. You would stand on pit wall lap after lap after lap.
“When it came down to the end and the fans started screaming, and you jump on the wall. The other two cars didn’t come around and then you just had to wait because you didn’t know what order they were going to come around. And then when you saw him (Richard Petty) on the inside, you knew you were going to win the race and that was a pretty ecstatic moment for us.”
And how did that affect the team’s sponsorship for the remainder of the season and years to come?
“STP was back on the car the next race.”