Richard Petty finally won Firecracker 400 at Daytona 50 summers ago

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When the NASCAR haulers rolled into Daytona Beach in the summer of 1975, Richard Petty's future Hall of Fame plaque was already largely engraved.
He'd won five of what would become seven Cup Series championships. He'd also won five of his eventual seven Daytona 500s.
He'd even already won 171 races, almost exactly twice the amount of David Pearson, who ranked second on the list then and second after both men finished racing.
But Petty had never won Daytona's 'other race,' the Firecracker 400, forerunner to this Saturday evening's Coke Zero Sugar 400. In 14 previous tries, he'd come close. Agonizingly so, as recently as the previous year, when Pearson either out-foxed him or pulled a dirty trick (depending on your angle) to win a third straight Firecracker 400 — he'd end up winning five overall.
Petty, meanwhile, had finished second at the 400 each of the previous four years, first to Bobby Isaac in 1971 and then three straight times to his 1970s nemesis, the Silver Fox.
Ever since Daytona International Speedway opened in 1959 and soon thereafter debuted the annual Fourth of July race, Petty had always spent his July 2 birthday at the World Center of Racing. He'd get his cake, but never left town with a trophy as the ultimate gift.
That drought ended in 1975, two days after his 38th birthday. In the end there wasn't a ton of dramatics, though the King of stock-car racing had to methodically overcome going a lap down in the early going.
Richard Petty on starting 13th: 'I'm gonna try that'
Petty had started 39 races at Daytona by the summer of 1975, including 500s, 400s and Thursday qualifiers that set the lineup for the Daytona 500 in February. He'd started just about everywhere in the 39 lineups.
On July 4, 1975, for the first time ever at Daytona, he started 13th. It was hardly a bad omen, as he suggested in a pre-race interview on ABC.
'I've started from every position but 13th, so I'm gonna try that and see if I can win with that,' he told former F1 world champ Jackie Stewart, longtime ABC commentator and that year's wingman for play-by-play legend Keith Jackson.
Buddy Baker, the large and popular racer who loved the bigger, faster speedways, dominated early and often in Bud Moore's No. 15 Ford. He led the first 19 laps and, at day's end, had led 118 of the 160.
A.J. Foyt, the IndyCar god making one of his occasional NASCAR starts, led some laps and remained in the mix much of the day, along with Pearson and Donnie Allison, who'd won the pole position at nearly 187 mph.
Lumberjacks co-starred with Richard Petty in 1975
Two things happened in the first half of the race — one significant to the competition at hand, the other a quaint artifact from past televised coverage of NASCAR racing.
First, Petty, running 12th at the time, pulled his colorful No. 43 Dodge into the pits about 10 laps ahead of the normal pit cycle. ABC's pit reporter, Chris Economaki, suggested he was having handling problems and wanted four new tires sooner than later.
About that time, ABC broke away from its Saturday afternoon broadcast, but that didn't necessarily mean viewers would miss anything. The race was part of ABC's Wide World of Sports program on Saturday afternoon, July 5, though it had been run the previous morning.
Therefore, as Baker and Allison were battling for the lead, ABC went to a previously taped closeup of Keith Jackson telling viewers the program was breaking away for other sporting fare — as Wide World of Sports routinely did. This time, it was taking viewers to the World Lumberjack Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin.
'I've been there, I really enjoyed it,' Jackson told viewers in his familiar style. 'So let's have a look at what the lumberjacks can do in the north woods of Wisconsin.'
To give some sense that the race coverage was live, ABC fast-forwarded a bit before coverage returned to Daytona, where the leaders had made their scheduled pit stops, allowing Petty back on the lead lap, where he began picking his way toward the front.
David Pearson's Firecracker 400 streak goes up in smoke
Pearson, in his often-dominant Wood Brothers Mercury, led three times for 20 total laps, but just after he took the lead for the third time, smoke poured from the back of the No. 21, the result of a broken oil line. His three-year hold on the Firecracker 400 was over.
'We don't know what it was. It started throwing oil out,' Pearson told Economaki. 'We felt like we were in real good shape to win the race.'
Pearson's exit left the battle to Petty and Baker — the two North Carolinians had been teammates at Petty Enterprises a few years earlier.
'Two old horses out there,' was how Jackson described it.
Baker gave up the lead to Petty for the last time on Lap 148, and would follow him the final 13 laps to the checkers. The margin of victory was 2.3 seconds.
Nobody handled Daytona like Richard Petty
Career win No. 172 was worth $17,185, which wouldn't carry a race team's weekend tire bill these days. After depositing that check, Petty was within about $10,000 of becoming NASCAR's first racer to reach $2 million in career earnings.
He'd go on to win two more Firecracker 400s as well as two more Daytona 500s, giving him 10 Daytona wins overall, but he only won one pole position at Daytona over his 35-year career. His cars were most noted for their balance and steady handling — or as Petty and some others called it, han'lin.
The '75 Firecracker fit that winning recipe.
'We could run the same speed all day long,' Petty said from Victory Lane. 'Our car wouldn't run fast, but we could run wide-open all the way around the racetrack — 179, 180 was fast enough to win the race.'
A year earlier, Petty's fourth straight Firecracker runner-up led to the only time most onlookers saw him outwardly angry at another driver. He and Pearson, for their extended on-track rivalry, got along fine, but not on July 4, 1974.
That day, Petty was on Pearson's rear bumper approaching the final lap. As they were about to cross under the white flag, Pearson got completely off the gas, forcing a startled Petty to quickly jerk his car to the right and go around Pearson.
Pearson knew it was better to be trailing than leading on the final lap, given the famed slingshot pass that defined that Daytona era. Petty later called it a dangerous move and confronted Pearson about it, but Pearson shrugged it off.
In Victory Lane a year later, Economaki asked Petty if he'd been thinking about that previous year's finish, and Petty answered with his familiar smile and style, grammar be damned.
'I was 'til Pearson blowed up; then I didn't worry about it no more.'
— Email Ken Willis at [e-mail]
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Richard Petty finally got his Firecracker win at Daytona 50 years ago