SWERVE OR DIE

The NASCAR legend looks back on his life on the racetrack.

“From the highest highs to the lowest lows, no one has lived the NASCAR life quite the way I have.” So writes Petty, now 62, old enough to have grown up in a time when muscle cars were made not just of Malibus and Barracudas, but also Monte Carlos and even Buicks. The conventional wisdom, he writes, is that NASCAR grew out of jocular contests between bootleggers after outrunning the revenuers. In fact, the races began as a pastime by soldiers who, having returned from the battlefronts of World War II, didn’t have much else in the way of entertainment in the South. Petty’s grandfather was one such racer, as was his father, and Petty’s son—who was killed on the track in 2000, when he was only 19—extended the racing tradition to make the Pettys the only known four-generation sports dynasty in history. Writing with the assistance of Henican, Petty is a capable storyteller who’s comfortable on and off the track, and if some of his racing reminiscences are geared toward the motorhead set, he records plenty of human-interest yarns—not least his affecting writing about his son’s death. One interesting anecdote concerns Petty’s relatively brief tenure as a country singer, summoned by Hank Williams Jr. to reflect on the long shadows their famous fathers cast. Another recalls his struggle to find an appropriate memorial to his son in the form of a camp for underprivileged kids, one that came into being with the benevolent support of racer and track fan Paul Newman. Just as vivid are the author’s accounts of the many mishaps a track driver is bound to suffer in the pursuit of a decidedly dangerous sport. Recalling a crash, he writes, “That didn’t look normal. It was a bone sticking out of my left thigh. A big bone. A very big bone.”

An alternately entertaining and sobering look at the sport and big business of auto racing.