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Remembering Adam Kyle Petty talks of his son, racing and safety
It has been almost three months since Adam Petty was killed during a practice run May 12 at the New Hampshire International Speedway in Loudon. In the first full interview since his son's death, Kyle Petty talks with CNNSI.com's motor sports correspondent Marty Snider about the effect of the loss of Adam on the Petty family, on racing and the sport's safety. The interview was conducted in front of the home of Kyle's late grandfather, Lee Petty, at Petty Enterprises in Level Cross, N.C. Marty Snider: First of all, how have you been the past couple of months? It's been almost three months now [since the accident]. Kyle Petty: You look at the calendar and it has almost been three months. It seems like yesterday, especially just coming back from St. Louis. That's where Adam ran his first Busch race. There were a lot of fans out there who were there that first year when he drove for [Busch Series team owner] Tad [Geschickter] and saw that race, and I got tons of pictures from that race. But everybody's doing good. Patti [Kyle's wife] is doing good. Austin [Kyle's younger son] is doing good. Montgomery Lee [Kyle's daughter] is doing good. Everybody is doing pretty good. Marty Snider: Tell me about what happened when you were in Europe and you heard the news about Adam's death. Describe the events of the day. Petty: You know, I'll say this: We went to Europe, Montgomery Lee and I did. And we got there and we went to a horse show and that was one of the reasons we were there. And we got back to the hotel that night and I had a message. I'm not even sure what time it was. It must have been four or five in the afternoon, which must have been about 12 or 12:30 over here. And it was from [NASCAR's senior vice president and chief operating officer Mike] Helton. So I tried to get in touch with Helton and couldn't. I finally got in touch with him and when I did he just told me there had been an accident and it looked pretty bad. I just told him to call me back and let me know. There's nothing I can do about it from here. And Montgomery Lee and I just prayed.
Helton called me back. And I have to say this, Mike Helton did a phenomenal job. I don't think there's any way to put somebody in that type of position to have to call somebody and tell them about a family member or a child [is extremely difficult]. I think Mike and the guys at NASCAR did an incredible job on it. Marty Snider: But you actually kept the word from Montgomery Lee? Petty: I didn't want Montgomery Lee to know. While we were in Europe I didn't want her to know because I wanted her to have her memories of just the day we spent in Europe to still be pretty good. So I didn't tell her until we got back. We flew back across the next morning. And we got home. [We were picked up] with some people we know from up in New York. They picked us up at one airport and took us to the next airport. And we got on our plane to come home. And when we got on the plane to come home, then I told Montgomery Lee what had happened. So by the time we got home she had calmed down a little bit ... so that was good for Patti. Austin had really done a lot for Patti ... and then we were all back together again. Snider: How difficult was it for you to not tell her? I mean you had to anguish inside knowing you were not able to tell her? Petty: Yeah, you know, yeah it was hard. I think you have to sit and think about it and you say, "OK, what's important here?" And I think the important thing was to try and keep Montgomery Lee calm and let her deal with it in her own way and then I could deal with it later on. And that was probably the hard part -- just going to breakfast the next morning and hanging out and just trying to be normal and buy a CD player and do stuff that she wanted to do because her CD player broke going over on the plane. And do some of that stuff, just do normal stuff. It was kind of hard to do that. Return to the topMarty Snider: Have things gotten better? Petty: (pauses) I don't know what you consider "better." Are things normal? No. Things aren't normal. They were normal before May 12th. They haven't been normal since. So every day is different. Every day you address different. Every time you see something or you go somewhere or you do something, something's different. You know, so I can't say anything has gotten back to normal. And I'm not sure. ... I watched a thing the other night on TV with Art Linkletter about when his daughter died. And you know, like he said, his life never really got back to normal. That was a defining moment in his life. It was before she died and then his life was after she died. And that's kind of the way it's been for us. It's life before Adam and life after Adam. I don't think it's been normal like it was before Adam. Marty Snider: How have things changed around the house or wherever? Petty: We were real close, the whole family was. If you look at Austin and if you looked at Montgomery Lee and you looked at myself and Patti and Adam, we always went to La Hacienda together, the Mexican restaurant. We were always out messing around. When we were at the racetrack Adam would stay on my bus or I would go over to his bus. The majority of time we would just take one and just stay on one bus. But we spent a lot of time together. You know I think the thing has been that, for the last three or four years, even though I have worked here at Petty Enterprises and I've had my own team, I spent a lot of hours in a day trying to say, "This is what we need to do for Adam." Hiring people, and working with [crew chief of the No. 45 car] Chris Hussey and trying to get that stuff. And even at that, I spent a lot of hours working with Montgomery Lee with her horses and Austin doing his stuff. And if you take your day and you divide it up and all of a sudden a third of your day that you had spent working with somebody or doing something is gone, then the days are different. I think there's a lot of things different. We, for a long time we didn't go back to the same restaurants that we ate out because it was just so strange to go in and not have him there. You know it's different at night. You keep waiting around for the door to open up and for him to come back in where he's been off with his friends. But that doesn't happen either. I just think there are a lot of things that are different.
Petty: Oh, yeah. Shoot yeah. Yeah. Not nights. Still days. Know what I mean? Still times at a racetrack. When I'm at the racetrack, that you'll just go up in the truck and sit down. And to some degree it will be that way. I saw Bobby and Judy Allison at St. Louis and I've talked to Bobby almost every weekend. And Bobby says the same thing. I can't imagine, he loses Davey and Clifford. I can't imagine losing two sons. That's got to be phenomenal and you can see the stress that it put on a marriage. They separated and now they are back together. But you know that's an incredible amount of stress to lose a child. To lose a husband or a father or something like that is traumatic. But you know, to have a kid and to lose a son, that's a little bit different in some ways. Return to the topMarty Snider: I'm sure it's the best medicine for you, that's the cliche to be at the racetrack. But how difficult is it to be at the racetrack? Petty: It's difficult to say. I don't find it as difficult. ... I tell you I find Thursday nights hard. That's my hardest time at the racetrack is when I first get to a racetrack on the Thursday night. Because Thursday nights, like I've said before, Thursday nights were the time that Adam would be there and I would be there. Because either he had practice on Thursday or they were just starting on Friday morning. And Patti would be at home with Montgomery Lee and Austin and she wouldn't come in until Saturday or Sunday to watch Adam's race and then my race. And Austin or Montgomery Lee wouldn't either. So when you look at it, then Thursday night was a time we spent a lot of time together and talked about the racetrack if he had already been on the racetrack. You know, you could talk about different things. So Thursdays are kind of hard, but once you get into the racetrack then it's not as bad. And once I get in the car, then it's easier. It's a lot easier in the car then it is even out and around the car or out talking to people. It's a lot easier to just get in the car and go drive the car. Marty Snider: Why the decision not to run Winston Cup anymore and to run Adam's car solely? Petty: I don't know. I didn't really look at it as much of a decision to tell you the truth (laughs). It's like I said the other day [when] we were doing some stuff, "Winston Cup racing may be the pinnacle of motor sports, but it's not the pinnacle of life." I think being a good father, and a good husband, and a good Christian puts you at the top of the list on that part. And I think when I sit back and look at the priorities, then my priority was to Patti, Montgomery Lee and Austin. And when we sat down and talked about what we wanted to do, then Adam is still a part of our family. We looked at that part as the 45 car being his. So our whole goal is to keep the 45 car up and running. So if that meant stepping back and running late-model stock cars at Caraway [Speedway in Asheboro, N.C.] or running something totally different, then that's what we were going to do, was keep this team together and keep it up and running. So it wasn't much of a decision. The hard part of the whole thing was to sit down with Sprint and sit down with Hot Wheels. And I'll say this, and I've said it before, when we made the announcement I think the big thing was in the whole announcement that we made about Steve Grissom driving the 44 [car] for the remainder of the year and myself driving the 45 [car]. [It] was not so much what Kyle Petty or Steve Grissom or Petty Enterprises did, it's what Hot Wheels did and it's what Sprint did. When you take two companies that have planned their marketing and everything they do around this sport, and then all of a sudden they step back and they say, "No, no, no. This is going to be better for our relationship. It's better for the family." It wasn't a business decision for them. And when you see companies do that, I think that's pretty big. Marty Snider: From strictly a race car standpoint, did the 44 kind of need to take a step back maybe? Petty: No, I don't think so because you look at the 44 team and you look at the way we've run and you say, "God, they've been running terrible." At the same time we had kind of leveled off. So we, when you are inside, it's like when you do pit row a lot of times, you see things during a pit stop that the guy in the third row doesn't see. And you say, "Oh, that was a good decision." But it doesn't play out for another 20 laps or another 100 laps. And that's kind of the way we were. We were moving people around. We put [No. 44 crew chief] Fred Graves in position. We had done some stuff internally. [But it] hadn't panned out yet. "Did you need to step back?" No, you need to keep hammerin' it. And that's the reason that we're going to continue to run it with Steve Grissom because we need that team to still go out there and run and still go out and be competitive. And we feel like Steve and Fred and those guys can do that. Return to the topMarty Snider: That hat (Kyle's wearing one with number 45 on it). I know it means a lot to you. Are you not ever going to take that hat off? I think you've worn that every day since May. Petty: (smiles) I've got a bunch of them. I don't know. I just started wearing them when the accident happened. Austin had been in Adam's shop and he had gotten five or six boxes. He was on his way to camp doing some stuff. And he had gotten five or six boxes of Adam's hats to give some of the kids at camp and to give some of the counselors and stuff. And when it happened they were just in the trunk of his car and he brought them in the house and put them up so nobody would mess with them. I think he's had one on about every day and I've had one on about every day since then. And that's just the way ... that's part of our deal too. We just keep that going. Marty Snider: I don't want this to sound bad, but are you tired of people coming up to you and saying they're sorry? I was beside you at St. Louis and five people walked up in a 10-minute time period. Does that get old? Petty: No, I don't think it does and I'll tell you why. It's funny, we're in a strange situation. I think a couple of different things have happened here. I think you lose someone you love and that's incredible. I don't think that I ever thought that what we do, as far as driving race cars, affected the people like it affects people. I never realized, even though I knew how big Richard Petty was and what Dale Earnhardt does or Jeff Gordon. I don't think I ever really realized how it affected the guy sitting in the third row. Or how this kid, that's 8 years old looked at Jeff Gordon and how these people looked at Adam. It totally baffled me that these people, they took him into their family. And they feel as great of a loss of Adam as we do. That's been kind of a strange deal for me to say. You know he really ... this kid went out and touched a lot of people's lives. Kenny Irwin touched a lot of people's lives. Just being a race car driver, you touch a lot of people's lives and you don't understand that. I think being a sports figure, you touch a lot of people and you don't understand that. I never fully grasped that so I think that's one thing. Number two is our grief and our loss has been very public. Obviously. I have friends and I know people who have lost a son or lost a husband or lost a wife or a daughter or whatever. That's part of their deal. They feel like after three or four months everybody forgot 'em, except them. You know what I mean? And to some degree that's probably true. A lot of people do go on with their life and they do forget that such and such, her father died or such and such daughter died or whatever. But with Adam, we go to these places where he's raced before and we're going back to Bristol since he raced there. We're going back to Charlotte or Daytona or Rockingham and places like that. And the fans that are in that area, they haven't seen you. So it's their opportunity to come and for them to finally say, "Hey, we're sorry that it happened." No, you know it's medicine for me and I think it is to some degree medicine for fans.
Marty Snider: Right after it happened, you were worried that people would forget about Adam. Are you still concerned about that? Petty: I think Patti's more worried than I was worried and I think that's a mother thing. But no, I'm not concerned about it. I don't think so. I think, it's like I said, I don't think that either one of us realized how many lives that he touched personally, but how many lives you touch as a race car driver. That's one of the deals like I said, we're keeping the 45 team up and running for his memory. Snider: As a Christian you have to believe certain things. Petty: Oh, yeah. Return to the topMarty Snider: There's always good that comes out of everything. What possible good has come out of this? Petty: I think tons of good has, to be honest with you. And I go back to saying how many people's lives he touched. You know, we always made a point, and we've said this from the very beginning in all kinds of interviews. We always made a point every night before we go to bed, Austin, Montgomery Lee, Adam, Patti and myself, we'd gather in our bedroom and say our prayers. And you would not believe the letters that we've gotten from people that say, "You know, that was a witness to us. Now we get our kids together and we say prayers every night." That's good. If there's two people out there that are praying together or a father out there. ... Mark Martin and some of those other drivers have said, "We can't believe, we always remember Kyle and Adam telling each other they loved each other before they got into a race car." You know I'm 40 years old, Adam was 19. There's nothing to be ashamed in telling your father that you love him. Or being a 19-year-old and telling your parents that you love them. I told Dale Jarrett and I told Mark Martin that if I ever see them not hugging [son] Matt [Martin] or hugging [son] Jason [Jarrett] or [son] Zachary [Jarrett] and kissing them and telling them that you love them, I'm going to kick your rear end. Because that's just part of it. So I think things like that have a lot of good. A lot of things that Adam has done has come out. But I think the main thing is that he was just a pretty good kid. He wasn't a saint. I'm not going to say that he was, you know what I mean? But he was just a pretty good kid. He'd shown a lot of people how much that he loved his family and how much he loved God. Marty Snider: What was the most difficult part for you? Petty: You know, I don't think there is a "most difficult part." I think it's all difficult. I don't think that you can, and I've said it before, we're not the first people to lose a son or to lose a child. And I think that everyone deals with it different. I think that everyone that I've talked to ... Martha Nemechek and to [her son and race driver] Joe [Nemechek]. They called instantly. Joe lost a brother [John in 1997 at a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series event in Homestead, Fla.]. Martha, they lost a son. It's the same thing. Talk to Bobby and Judy [Allison] and I think everybody deals with it different. And I think everybody deals with it however you were raised. Obviously, we're from the rural South. I was raised in a Methodist church and our beliefs may be different than a Baptist or different than a Catholic or whatever. You pull back on your faith in God and you believe in whatever you believe. I just think it has all been hard. It's been hard for me to go upstairs in the same house that I live in and in his room. It's been hard for me to go to a house that he just built. Things like that have been hard, but none of it has been harder than the rest of it. Marty Snider: How has it changed Kyle Petty? Do race cars mean less to you now? Or does family mean more? How is Kyle Petty different since May 12th? Petty: I don't know. Things don't bother me like they used to. You know how it is to sit in traffic at the racetrack? And it just grates on your last nerve? [Now] I could sit there for six hours. It doesn't bother me. I'm not in a hurry about things. I think I was in a hurry in life before to get through life. To get to a point. To get Adam up and running and to get this going and to get that going. To get Petty Enterprises back to do this, to do that. Everything is a lot slower for me. The world moves a lot slower. I think I'd like to spend a lot more time just talking to Montgomery Lee or just talking to Austin or just talking to Patti. Lot less time watching TV. It's just simple things. It's not that your total attitude on life has changed. I still love life. I still enjoy what I do. I don't have any regrets about what I do. I don't have any regrets about what Adam did. Because that's what he truly loved, to drive a race car. Austin on the other hand could care less about it. Montgomery Lee is the same way. They could care less about racing or race cars. But I think as a person, it's made me more conscious about what you think about things or what other people think about things. And it's not just all about Kyle Petty. It's about other people. Return to the topMarty Snider: What did you say to the [Kenny] Irwin family? I know you called them. Petty: I talked to them a couple of times. You know, all I really told them was that from the time I heard [about his death], I was at a restaurant in High Point [N.C.] when I heard it. And [president] Diane Huff from the Winston Cup Racing Wives Auxiliary, she called and she said, "I want you to hear this before you hear it on the radio because it is still that fresh." And she told me and I left the restaurant and I went and called [the Irwins], I told them, "You know, nobody knows exactly how you feel. I just lost Adam and I'm going to tell you that I don't even know how you feel. But the thing is, if you ever need to talk to somebody, then we'll talk." I've tried to stay in touch with them off and on. But you've got to give people their space, too. There's nothing you can say. I grieve for them and prayed for them because I know what they went through. The initial shock of it. That kind of wears away after four or five days. And then all of a sudden everybody comes to Indy, they go to the funeral and then the next day there's nobody there but you and your family and I told them to just lean on your family. Snider: That's the hard time isn't it? Petty: That is a hard time. The hard time. But he had three beautiful sisters. They've got three great daughters. I've talked to every one of them. And that's where they've got to draw their strength from. They've got to draw their strength from his three sisters, Kenny's three sisters and their family. And from God. And Patti talked to them not too long ago and I think they are doing fairly well. As well as can be expected. They'll have good days and bad days. Marty Snider: Do you still feel Adam around? Do you even talk to him? That may sound odd. Do you still feel his presence? Petty: Oh yeah. You still feel his presence. You can walk into this Busch shop right now. And it's funny because we still refer to it as 'Adam's" shop. "Where are you going today?" "Well I've got to get over to 'Adam's' shop." You know what I mean? That's just the way it is. Because that's what it was. This is Petty Enterprises. That's "Adam's" shop. There's the "truck" shop. Those are just names that you assign to things. You don't just change it in a day. In 20 years it will probably still be "Adam's" shop. That's probably still the way we'll look at it. So yeah, you still feel his presence in a lot of things you do and you still think about things. When I go to do something, sometimes I say, "OK, now, if I'm going to do this, how would Adam do it?" Or we've talked about this, what had we talked about? So yeah, you still think about stuff. Snider: And in some sense you probably draw strength from him in some ways. Petty: Oh, yeah, definitely so. I think we all do. Like I said, just because of the memories and what you had from him, yeah you definitely draw strength. Marty Snider: One thing that I think is neat and if you don't want to talk about it that's fine. But one thing that I think is neat is how you buried Adam. Tell us what you did and why? Petty: We didn't really bury Adam. We buried the car is what we did. We just took the car and we put it someplace where nobody can get to it. The one thing we didn't want is this, I'll say this, is that we didn't want a place where people would come and constantly come and bring stuff and put flowers out and do stuff like that. I want you to remember Adam the way that you saw him the last time. Or you saw him walk through a garage area. The way you saw him smile. The way you saw him drive a race car. Everybody needs to remember him their own special way. And with the guys at the shop, I wanted the guys to do the same thing. So when we brought the car back, myself and a couple of guys from the shop took the car and put it somewhere so the other guys at the shop, some of the guys at the shop don't even know whatever happened to it. Because I didn't want it to be a reminder for them. So for us, that was a way of taking that, putting it to the side and saying, "There it is." Now we know where everything is at, but we're the only people that do know where everything is at. That's just a deal for us mostly. Return to the topMarty Snider: I think the answer is "no" but is New Hampshire [International Speedway] inherently dangerous? Petty: I don't think so and I don't blame New Hampshire in any way, shape or form. There's been a lot said about all this stuff. And race car drivers talk about it all the time to some degree. Race car drivers never really get into it and talk about it because they're afraid to talk about it. That's just the way it is. You don't want to think that's going to happen. But I don't think so. I think there are turns at Sears Point [Raceway in Sonoma, Calif.] that are more dangerous than New Hampshire. There are places, Martinsville [Speedway in Martinsville, Va.], that are more dangerous than New Hampshire. I don't think you can say in degrees. You know it's not like saying, "OK, this is a No. 2 handicap hole and this is a No. 18 handicap hole." It's not that way at a racetrack. There's not a number two corner or a number 18 corner or any of that. To get in a car and go out and run as hard as you can push the envelope is inherently dangerous. There's a certain degree of risk if I do it, you do it, if anybody does it. You assume some quantitative of responsibility for doing it. So I don't blame New Hampshire. I think the people at New Hampshire, the people at the racetrack who own the racetrack, the Bahres [Gary and Rob], the safety crews, the doctors there ... They did everything they could do. I don't blame anybody, anywhere. New Hampshire's been there for how many years now? Seven, eight years whatever? Never had a problem. And all of a sudden you have two [fatal wrecks] in a month and a half and now everybody jumps on New Hampshire. I look at it in some degrees like the Concorde. The plane flew for 30 years and they have one wreck and now everybody is wanting to shoot them out of the sky and put them on the ground and ban them forever. One accident in 30 years is a phenomenal record. And the way that New Hampshire has been, a couple of accidents like this ... yes, it's tragic. Incredibly tragic. I think you need to take it. You need to look at it. You need to evaluate it. And you need to say, "How can we make it better?" But to just condemn everything up there is wrong. Marty Snider: How can we make it better? Do we need to do something at flat tracks to make the walls softer or anything like that? Petty: I don't know. I have a hard time believing there's anything like a "soft wall." The word "wall" just implies hard, OK? That's just the way it is. There's probably ways to soften the Styrofoam or tires or you know maybe, some form that somebody's making out there right now that we don't know anything about. There may be. But still, you are never going to take all the danger out of it. Somebody's going to run up under the wall. Somebody's going to flip over the wall. Something is going to happen. And then you are going to ask, "OK, now what can we do?" You've got to continually fix. NASCAR has been incredible. If you go back through the history of NASCAR, NASCAR has been reactionary in a lot of ways. When cars exploded, they said, "OK, why did it explode?" They came up with a fuel cell. Goodyear comes up with inner liners when tires start blowing. You come up with window nets that keep drivers in cars. They keep looking for safety features and being innovative about stuff. It always takes a tragedy before you get to that point. And I think that NASCAR has set up a deal now where they are looking to try to pre-empt things like that. But all you can do is go back and say, "OK, what can we do right now?" Is something going to happen in the next six months? Doubtful. But hopefully something will happen in the next two to three years. Marty Snider: Drivers won't talk about it much but hopefully, you might. Are drivers, is it fair to say drivers are more concerned lately? Petty: I think probably so. Probably so because it's been brought back to the forefront. But if you look at the sport, it ebbs and flows. You'll have a couple of bad accidents and everybody gets real safety-conscious. And then you'll go for a couple of years and everybody forgets it. And then you'll have a couple of bad accidents and everybody gets real safety-conscious again. The point is to put somebody or some group and say, "This is your job. Study this." You know what I mean? I mean, we spend countless hours in a wind tunnel. GM right now has a group of engineers that's working on seat safety and driver compartment safety. And some of the stuff that they've done has been phenomenal. It's not implemented yet. But they're got some really good stuff coming. That's GM as a company working on it. If Ford and Dodge get together and do some stuff, then that's what needs to be done. Maybe you need to take some people from GM, Ford and Dodge and put them all together. Kind of like how NASCAR did with the roof flaps and some of the other stuff. And say, "OK, let's put these groups of engineers together, come up with ways to not only make the racetrack safer, but to make the car safer. It's at a forefront now, but it will get away from us before too much longer if you don't stay on top of it. Marty Snider: We talked about it at Dover that when you came back, that was the beginning of a long and difficult road back after a normal life. Will life ever be normal again? Petty: You'd like to think so and Patti and I have talked about it. You'd like to think, yeah that it will. But I think deep down inside you know, no it won't. And I think deep down inside you pray that it won't because you realize, if it ever does become normal, that you've lost Adam. And you've lost that part. And I think you want to keep part of that hurt so that it's always there as a reminder you know that something bad did happen. But you try to make the best out of it to make it not hurt as bad. Return to the top
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