dpkimmel2001
Team Owner
For those of you that are interested.....
Petty Blue is a documentary that will air on CMT starting Oct. 8th.
The “Petty Blue” documentary that will air on CMT next month tells the story of the legendary Petty family through racing. It is not the story of the Petty family and its racing history.
Obviously the Petty family and racing are tightly intertwined. But this is not a story about how Petty Enterprises rose to the top only to find itself unable to continue the glory. It doesn’t examine or explore why, after Richard Petty’s seven titles, the family business couldn’t match the accomplishments from earlier years.
Instead, it’s a story about the lives of the Pettys through four generations of racing. While Kevin Costner narrates it, most of the stories and analysis comes from members of the Petty family.
The glue holding it all together are the comments from Richard Petty’s wife, Lynda, which carry the film because she knew all four of the Petty racers – Lee, Richard, Kyle and Adam – as well as the dynamics of Petty Enterprises where Richard’s brother, Maurice, and cousin, Dale Inman, played critical roles underneath the car.
The good days, including several victory celebrations and Richard’s 200th NASCAR Cup victory among them, and the bad days, including the career-ending accident for patriarch Lee Petty and the death of Adam, are included in the film.
Richard Petty attended the premier without Lynda, who is recovering from treatment for brain cancer.
“She has cancer in her eye and can’t really see,” Petty said after the film’s premiere in Charlotte on Tuesday night. “She could have seen the outlines and stuff but couldn’t make out nothing. She’s waiting to see the thing once she gets her eye [sight] back.
“She’s been going through chemo so they got rid of all the cancer in her body, but now she’s got cancer in her eye. They’re going to do radiation for that. They feel like they can take care of that. Hopefully in the next month or month-and-a-half she’ll be able to see pretty good.”
What will he tell her about her role in the film?
“The girls have already called her on the phone, I guarantee, and told her she was the star of the show,” Richard said about his three daughters. “Richard Petty was just second-hand.”
Kyle Petty did not attend the viewing, which spends considerable time on the death of his son Adam and the impact it had on the family.
In addition to talking about the sadness of losing a child, Kyle talks about how he and his father are not great friends but enjoy a more standard father-son relationship.
Richard’s relationship with his father, Lee, was one where compliments where not handed out often. Lee Petty even protested, and later was declared the winner, of what would have been Richard’s first victory.
There are interviews with Lee, who died in April 2000 just about six weeks before Adam died during Busch Series practice at New Hampshire, sprinkled throughout the film.
Lee Petty got his start much like other racers of the time, by running moonshine. Richard also admitted that he had been on “a few” moonshine runs with his father.
“We give Junior [Johnson] all the credit for that,” Richard said, laughing. “That was back after The Depression and during the war and stuff, that was the only way a lot of country people had to make a living and Daddy just happened to be involved with it.”
Early pictures of Richard Petty show he had the nickname “Squirrel” painted next to his name on the driver-side door.
“They had a couple of guys from California that came back here and run and I had just started and I was pretty squirrelly, I was all over the race track,” Petty said. “These California boys started calling me, ‘Squirrel’ because that was what anybody that was out of control like was, they called a squirrel.
“I took it up and put it on the side of the car.”
The last part of the movie is not as happy with the death of Adam and the closing of Petty Enterprises. Many people believe Petty Enterprises might be around today if the fourth-generation racer had not been killed.
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Richard Petty said. “God put a period there and the game was over. So then we had to gather up everything and do the best we could. … If you looked at what my dad had done, what I done, what Kyle accomplished and what we thought Adam could accomplish, then it would still be going on.
“But it wasn’t meant to be.”
The movie, produced by CMT and NASCAR Media Group, will be available on DVD starting Sept. 21. CMT will begin airing it Oct. 8.
“The big deal is it was a family operation,” Richard Petty said. “Like, Kyle said [in the movie], a farmer – I just happened to be the head farmer for a while, my dad was the head farmer for a time, Kyle was the head farmer and then we were waiting for Adam to be the head farmer.
“Our family just happened to be in racing, and we were more in the limelight than the farmers.”
Petty Blue is a documentary that will air on CMT starting Oct. 8th.
The “Petty Blue” documentary that will air on CMT next month tells the story of the legendary Petty family through racing. It is not the story of the Petty family and its racing history.
Obviously the Petty family and racing are tightly intertwined. But this is not a story about how Petty Enterprises rose to the top only to find itself unable to continue the glory. It doesn’t examine or explore why, after Richard Petty’s seven titles, the family business couldn’t match the accomplishments from earlier years.
Instead, it’s a story about the lives of the Pettys through four generations of racing. While Kevin Costner narrates it, most of the stories and analysis comes from members of the Petty family.
The glue holding it all together are the comments from Richard Petty’s wife, Lynda, which carry the film because she knew all four of the Petty racers – Lee, Richard, Kyle and Adam – as well as the dynamics of Petty Enterprises where Richard’s brother, Maurice, and cousin, Dale Inman, played critical roles underneath the car.
The good days, including several victory celebrations and Richard’s 200th NASCAR Cup victory among them, and the bad days, including the career-ending accident for patriarch Lee Petty and the death of Adam, are included in the film.
Richard Petty attended the premier without Lynda, who is recovering from treatment for brain cancer.
“She has cancer in her eye and can’t really see,” Petty said after the film’s premiere in Charlotte on Tuesday night. “She could have seen the outlines and stuff but couldn’t make out nothing. She’s waiting to see the thing once she gets her eye [sight] back.
“She’s been going through chemo so they got rid of all the cancer in her body, but now she’s got cancer in her eye. They’re going to do radiation for that. They feel like they can take care of that. Hopefully in the next month or month-and-a-half she’ll be able to see pretty good.”
What will he tell her about her role in the film?
“The girls have already called her on the phone, I guarantee, and told her she was the star of the show,” Richard said about his three daughters. “Richard Petty was just second-hand.”
Kyle Petty did not attend the viewing, which spends considerable time on the death of his son Adam and the impact it had on the family.
In addition to talking about the sadness of losing a child, Kyle talks about how he and his father are not great friends but enjoy a more standard father-son relationship.
Richard’s relationship with his father, Lee, was one where compliments where not handed out often. Lee Petty even protested, and later was declared the winner, of what would have been Richard’s first victory.
There are interviews with Lee, who died in April 2000 just about six weeks before Adam died during Busch Series practice at New Hampshire, sprinkled throughout the film.
Lee Petty got his start much like other racers of the time, by running moonshine. Richard also admitted that he had been on “a few” moonshine runs with his father.
“We give Junior [Johnson] all the credit for that,” Richard said, laughing. “That was back after The Depression and during the war and stuff, that was the only way a lot of country people had to make a living and Daddy just happened to be involved with it.”
Early pictures of Richard Petty show he had the nickname “Squirrel” painted next to his name on the driver-side door.
“They had a couple of guys from California that came back here and run and I had just started and I was pretty squirrelly, I was all over the race track,” Petty said. “These California boys started calling me, ‘Squirrel’ because that was what anybody that was out of control like was, they called a squirrel.
“I took it up and put it on the side of the car.”
The last part of the movie is not as happy with the death of Adam and the closing of Petty Enterprises. Many people believe Petty Enterprises might be around today if the fourth-generation racer had not been killed.
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Richard Petty said. “God put a period there and the game was over. So then we had to gather up everything and do the best we could. … If you looked at what my dad had done, what I done, what Kyle accomplished and what we thought Adam could accomplish, then it would still be going on.
“But it wasn’t meant to be.”
The movie, produced by CMT and NASCAR Media Group, will be available on DVD starting Sept. 21. CMT will begin airing it Oct. 8.
“The big deal is it was a family operation,” Richard Petty said. “Like, Kyle said [in the movie], a farmer – I just happened to be the head farmer for a while, my dad was the head farmer for a time, Kyle was the head farmer and then we were waiting for Adam to be the head farmer.
“Our family just happened to be in racing, and we were more in the limelight than the farmers.”
