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Racing At Daytona Is Family Tradition

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By CARTER GADDIS, The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 16, 2008

Updated: 02/15/2008 11:57 pm

DAYTONA BEACH - Kyle Petty remembers the square scoreboard that used to rise above the infield near the start-finish line at Daytona International Speedway in the 1960s. This was back when his father, Richard, still was relatively new to the family business.

Under that old scoreboard, and under the high platform where drivers' wives kept score for their husbands' cars during the race, was a playground.

It had it all, Kyle Petty remembers: A merry-go-round, swings, seesaws, sliding boards.

"We would stay under that scoreboard and play all day long," said Petty, born the year after his grandfather, Lee, won the inaugural Daytona 500 in 1959. "And they would send one mother down about every 30 minutes to make sure we hadn't killed each other."

For five decades, for the families fortunate enough to live the life of stock car racing, the Daytona 500 has meant more than the dawn of a new NASCAR season.

It is a family event, a yearly renewal for a flock of Pettys and Jarretts, Waltrips and Wallaces, Allisons and Earnhardts. To them, the Daytona 500 is the annual trip to the cabin by the lake, the sojourn at the beach cottage, and the Disney World vacation all rolled into one enormous spectacle of a race.

"My family still comes here. It's one of the few places that everybody does come," said three-time Daytona 500 winner Dale Jarrett, whose earliest memories of the race came when his father, Ned Jarrett, ran out of gas late to lose in 1963. "That's because of how special it is. We've been doing this for a long time. I was going to say 50 years, but not quite. It's close."

Not all the memories are the stuff of swing sets and seesaws. It was here that Dale Earnhardt Jr. lost his father in 2001. It was here that Bobby Allison and his brother, Donnie, got into an ugly, bloody scrap with Cale Yarborough after a final-lap crash in 1979.

Even seven-time Daytona 500 winner Richard Petty, the King, has a tough time exorcising certain memories.

"I think I look back in all my history down here and look at the things you done wrong, or the bad part, more than you do the good part," he said.

But it was here, too, that Darrell Waltrip, who won it in 1989, made the call from the broadcast booth as brother Michael won 12 years later. Ned Jarrett had a similar experience in 1993, calling the first of his son's three victories.

And it was here that Bobby Allison was granted two of his proudest moments as a father before losing his son, Davey, to a helicopter crash in 1993.

First, in 1988, Bobby and Davey Allison raced to the finish. The father won, if only he could remember.

"I should be able to tell you all about 1988," Bobby Allison said. "Fifty years old, win the 'Super Bowl' the third time in my career, with the best young man in racing second to me. How could anything be better than that anywhere in sports, anywhere in the world?"

A wreck later that year at Pocono robbed Bobby of certain memories. But then came 1992.

"I had been in recovery from '88 with incredible memory loss from what was going on, and was struggling with life, in general," Allison said. "But here was this young man Davey, who had been so much pleasure for me from the time that he was a little, bitty guy. And here he was winning the Daytona 500."

From these "family vacations" on the infield and asphalt of the 2.5-mile Daytona tri-oval sprung championship dreams.

Sterling Marlin was a first-grader when his father, Clifton "Coo Coo" Marlin, ran the race in 1967. Little Sterling watched from the bed of a pickup truck.

His dad completed one lap to finish last in a 50-car race won by Mario Andretti, but the Marlin family did not return home to Tennessee empty-handed.

"Where we stayed was close to an orange grove," Marlin said, "and we went and threw a bunch of oranges in the race car - we didn't have nowhere else to put 'em - so we piled all them oranges in the back of the race car and took 'em on back home."

Marlin later worked the pits for his father's car at Daytona. Later still, the younger Marlin won the race himself - twice.

Dale Jarrett, too, began to understand the enormity of the event, what it meant to his family as well as the sport, at a young age.

"Even though my dad never won it and ran out of gas that day in 1963, he had himself in position to win the Daytona 500," said Dale, who was 6 at the time. "And as a kid, I knew, seeing the disappointment on his face, just how big this race was at an early age. And it continues only to grow in my mind at this time."

The merry-go-round and swings of Kyle Petty's youth are long gone. But he is still here.

Where else would he be? It is, after all, a family tradition.

"This is the 50th running, and I've missed three," said Petty, 47. "And that's how it is, because we came down here every year. So, I've always been here. And whether I remember it or not, I've been here."

Reporter Carter Gaddis can be reached at (813) 259-8291 or igaddis@tampatrib.com.

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