Richard Petty gets life-size honor at every NASCAR track. ‘The King’ reflects on Daytona

Daytona felt like a different world to Richard Petty.

It was 1959, and Petty was driving a pickup truck through the tunnel as his trailer and race car followed. As he gazed into the distance, Turn 1 looked like a wall that was miles away.

Growing up in Carolina, Darlington was the biggest track Petty knew. The size of Daytona’s track was unlike anything he’d seen, and the area wasn’t nearly as built up yet. Combined with the Florida heat of the summer, it felt like a swamp.

Petty, now 86 and a seven-time Cup Series champion, will be honored at every NASCAR track this year. Starting with Daytona, there will be 28 life-size statues all over the circuit that depict Petty’s iconic cowboy hat.

“We were here when it all started,” Petty said inside the Daytona International Speedway media center. “We’ve seen all the changes ever since we first started. The first two or three races, we went in a family car — the race car — drove it to the race track. When it was over, we drove home. That’s how much things have changed.”

“The King’s hat” — a six-foot-tall, 1,000-pound fiberglass and concrete statue — arrives at each NASCAR track in celebration of the Petty family’s 75th year in racing.

Wearing his cowboy hat and sunglasses, Petty sat alongside his son, Kyle, on Wednesday. When the Petty family realized that this would be the 75th anniversary of the 1948 race on the sand in Daytona Beach, they sat down and reminisced.

“He’s 86, he’ll be 87 this year,” said Kyle Petty, an NBC racing analyst and former Cup driver. “And if he’d never driven a race car, he would still be that guy who’d have bought a ticket to the Daytona 500 every year since 1959. Because he’s just a race fan.”

They spoke a lot about their hometown of Level Cross, a small town of 3,694 in Randolph County. A rural area, it took Kyle until he was late in elementary school to realize that every kid’s father didn’t own a race car.

They know their neighbors on a first-name basis, rarely referring to each other by their surnames.

“We grew up in rural North Carolina in a rural community, where there were lots of farmers that were third- and fourth-generation farmers,” Kyle Petty said. “We just happened to raise race cars on our farms.”