Richard Petty’s ’76 ‘500’

"It wasn't a big deal then. When it was over, it was over. I don't think Pearson was mad at me. He shouldn't have been. Well, he should have been and he shouldn't have been... I wasn't mad at him. It was just one of those things. I was trying to win, and he was trying to win, and it just sorta happened.

"I go the [one lap to go] white flag and I was leading the race. We went up the back stretch and he pulls out and drafts me. We got into Turn Three and he moves up a little higher than he had been running. I cut down under him and I had a draft back on him.

"I thought I had cleared him when he got off of Turn Four, but naturally I was trying to shut the door on him too. If only I had known there had been those six inches, I sure wouldn't have pulled up in front of him. I thought I had cleared him. I was going to pull up in front of him so he was going to have to do some cutting to get by me, which would have bogged him down a little bit to the start-finish line. The deal was I lacked about six inches clearing him...

"When I went up on him, he had to turn left. If he didn't, he was going to run head-on into the wall. When he did, I think he hit the wall anyway. That got my car sideways and I finally spun. He came down through the grass into the infield and a car came down pit road that he hit and it straightened him out. If it hadn't been for that, he would have hit the inside guard rail. Then he wouldn't have won the race, cos neither one of us could have got going. I wound up about 20 yards short of the start-finish line, and in low gear, but he went across the grass and got there before I did and that was it.

"I wound up a lap down. They came out to push the car, and that's an automatic lap taken if you touch the car on the last lap. We were a lap ahead of Benny [Parsons], so that still allowed me to finish second. As close as that race was, Pearson was a lap ahead at the finish, so that makes it one of those good trivia question deals.

"It wasn't just another race: later, we knew it was a big deal. The last lap, the whole deal. A few years later, I told Cale [Yarborough] and Donnie [Alison, who'd had a televised post-race punch-up after taking each other off in the 1979 Daytona 500] they didn't have any class. They said, 'What do you mean' and I said, 'Me and Pearson did it on the front stretch so everybody could see it. Y'all did it on the backstretch in '79, so nobody could see it'.

"I don't think they had spotters back then [in '76]. Pearson will probably tell you that Leonard [Wood] or one of the boys was talking to him about where he was at and what he was doing, but they couldn't really see what was going on. We had radios, but we were just getting started with them.

"Nobody said anything. After looking at it, talking to me and talking to Pearson, it wasn't a deal where he ran at me and I ran at him. It wasn't done in any intentional way. If there was a mistake made, I made it because Pearson was just there. I was doing the moving around. He went by me, which was good, and I went almost back by him. That experience I carried over to '84 with me and Cale on the last lap [of the Firecracker 400 at Daytona], so I knew how to handle that particular situation. Cale hadn't been in that situation. Usually, when the guy goes by you, the momentum just carries you on and you don't get a chance to pass 'em again."