Nascar star Kyle Petty’s life in the fast lane detailed in memoir

Start your engines – and get ready for a wild ride.

Kyle Petty’s memoir, “Swerve or Die,” is as dramatic as its title. Written with Ellis Henican, it promises the story of “Life at My Speed in the First Family of NASCAR Racing.”

Grandson of one of the sport’s pioneers, son of perhaps its greatest star, Petty, 62, has seen plenty of victories and crashes; more than his share of tragedies, too.

But before he launches into his story, Petty explains the birth of stock car racing in the late ‘40s.

“That’s when soldiers were coming home from World War II and looking for something fun,” he explains. “The options were thin, in the South especially... It wasn’t until 1966 that the Braves hightailed it out of Milwaukee for Atlanta. The NFL, the NBA, and the NHL – those teams couldn’t find their way South with an Esso map and a Trailways bus ticket!”

But the South offered benefits the North didn’t have.

“We had plenty of pasture space and no shortage of good ol’ boys who were willing to go out on a Sunday after church and race,” he says. “And even more people who were willing to watch.”

NASCAR – officially the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing – held its first major event on June 19, 1949, on a red dirt track outside Charlotte, N.C. There were 33 contestants, including Lee Petty.

Was it true that he was a moonshiner like many early racers? “He was in beverage transportation,” is all his grandson will say.

Lee Petty raced a borrowed 1948 Buick Roadmaster. He lost, and totaled the car, but won the next race. The one after that, too. And after taking a good hard look at the risks of the “beverage transportation” industry and the prize money that accompanied racing, Lee Petty turned pro.

For the next 11 years, he would rank among the top NASCAR drivers, winning the first Daytona 500 in 1959 and three championships. Eventually, his oldest boy, Richard, joined him on the track. And although Lee Petty remained a tough competitor and an even tougher businessman, his son became a legend.

He may have been NASCAR royalty by birth, but Richard Petty earned his nickname “The King.” During a 35-year-career, he finished in the Top Ten over 700 times, won 200 races, and won the Daytona 500 seven times. Many of the records he set remain unbroken.

“The winningest driver in NASCAR,” his son writes. “I didn’t even know that was a word until people started saying it about my father.”

Growing up in that family, it was easy to feel the need for speed. At first, for Kyle, it was motorcycles; he got his first dirt bike at age 6. But soon, cars beckoned.

His father wanted him to wait until he turned 21, as he had. But the Pettys weren’t known for taking things slow. When it became clear Kyle wasn’t cut out for college — his night-school teacher sent him home because he always smelled like a garage — his father dropped the age requirement.

At age 18, and just one week after he married his girlfriend, Kyle was at Daytona.

The event wasn’t held by NASCAR but by the smaller ARCA, the Automobile Racing Club of America. Still, Kyle Petty came in first, setting his own record as the youngest winner of an ARCA race at 18 years and eight months. It also brought him a trophy and a check for $4,150.

And the Pettys were now on their third generation of stockcar drivers.

This Petty’s ride was a little bumpier, though. After that ARCA win in 1979, he went seven years before another first-place showing. Later, trying to analyze what had changed his luck, he decided it was because he’d been wearing his favorite underwear. He wore it until it fell apart. Then, for the rest of the season, he wore the elastic waistband — in vain.

He also got caught cheating once. At the time, the minimum weight of a NASCAR car was 3,700 pounds; anything lighter gave a racer an unfair advantage. So Petty and his team hid 350 pounds of lead weights inside the car, which they removed after they drove off the scale. Result? He had an edge with a car that only weighed 3,350 lbs., and easily came in second.

The only problem with this scheme was the rules stipulated that the top cars were then re-weighed. Back at the scale, Petty immediately confessed to the official. Thanks to owning up, and probably the Petty name, he was let off with only a warning.

“But I guess the whole experience still had the effect it was supposed to,” Petty says. “We never did anything quite like that again. Plenty of other crazy stuff. But not that again.”

There were some detours in life, too. For a while, he flirted with a music career, spending time in Nashville and opening for country star Hank Williams Jr. They shared notes on what it was like growing up in the shadow of a famous father.

A horrific accident on the track in 1991 sent Petty to the hospital with a compound fracture and took him off the circuit that summer.

Soon, though, someone would be gaining on him – his son, Adam. The boy had a single-minded fascination with cars.

“I have in my mind a chunky little boy of eight or nine years old wanting to drive a go-kart,” Petty writes.

He thought it best to not hand everything to his son, but with Adam’s abilities and determination, he turned pro at 18. Within three months broke his dad’s record for youngest champ and is believed to be the first fourth-generation pro athlete in American sports history.

Within two years, he was dead.

Adam was in the middle of a practice session for a race at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway when his throttle got stuck wide open as he went into a turn. He hit the wall head-on. He was 19.

The family had him cremated. Then they took his ashes, his uniform, his gloves, and his helmet, put them in his car, and buried it somewhere out in the country. They’ve never revealed the location. The only marker is a tree.

“I have no doubt that Adam’s soul and his spirit are in heaven now,” his father writes. “But what remained of his body would forever be in the company of the physical things he treasured most of all.”

Kyle Petty ran his last race in 2008. He devotes much of his time to charities, including a motorcycle tour, the Kyle Petty Charity Ride Across America. He also, in honor of his son, established Victory Junction, a camp for ill or disabled children modeled after Paul Newman’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang camp.

Although Petty has had his share of sorrows, he has no regrets.

“From the highest highs to the lowest lows, no one has lived the NASCAR life quite the way I have,” he writes. “Along with the worst nightmares any father can imagine, I’ve also been blessed with far more than my share of amazing experiences, and thrilling race day triumphs. It’s been one hell of a ride.”