Feud? What feud?
That was basically Richard Petty’s response when he was asked to comment on the Kyle Busch-Brad Keselowski situation.
Petty, owner of a record 200 victories in NASCAR’s highest national touring series, knows a little something about racin’ feuds. He had his share in a driving career that stretched across 34 years, and he’s seen even more than that during almost an entire lifetime spent in the sport.
He laughed about the Busch-Keselowski dustup and pretty much dismissed it. He even said that last year’s Keselowski-Denny Hamlin Nationwide affair was more serious than this current spat that has developed between Busch and Keselowski. Of course, he allowed that the situation could change—but only over time.
“For a feud, it has to last a while,” Petty said. “One battle here and then five or six weeks later there’s another little battle, that’s not a feud. A feud goes on when there are three or four races in a row where they’re beatin’ on each other.
“If you look at Keselowski and the guy who football jerseydrives the No. 11 car [Hamlin] and their [Nationwide Series] deal last year when [Hamlin] said, ‘We’re gonna get him’ and they ended up gettin’ him, that winds up being a feud. I mean, they really got at each other.”
Recap
In case you’ve been living in a cave, Busch spun Keselowski in the final laps of the Nationwide Series race at Bristol two weeks ago. Keselowski responded by calling Busch “an [expletive]” on the track’s public-address system during driver introductions prior to the Cup Series race.
Asked about it later—following yet another victory and completion of his unprecedented three-race weekend sweep of the Truck, Nationwide and Cup series races—Busch was asked what he thought of Keselowski’s little pre-race introduction.
His one-word response: “Who?”
“Brad Keselowski,” the reporter asking the question reminded.
Busch smirked and added, “Yeah, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“OK,” said the reporter, feigning frustration. “He drives the No. 12 car.”
“I saw it,” Busch admitted. “But I passed it.”
A few days later during a function at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C., former championship crew chief and car owner Ray Evernham questioned the wisdom of Keselowski’s verbal baiting of Busch—as well as Keselowski’s aggressive take-but-rarely-give driving style that Evernham said pushed Busch to the edge after Busch had raced Keselowski cleanly in close quarters for 20 laps.
King weighs in
Now you can add Petty to the list of those weighing in on the issue. He said the fiercest rivalry he ever experienced as a driver was not with David Pearson as many might have thought, but with Bobby Allison.
He said another factor contributed to the legendary feud between the two: at the height of it, in the early 1970s, both were at the top of their game and at the pinnacle of their sport.
“That was a feud. We were tryin’ to Bengals jersey knock each other out of the races and still win the races,” Petty said. “Of all the feuds, I would imagine that’s the biggest there has ever been as far as racin’ was concerned.
“I had run-ins with Cale [Yarborough] and Cale had run-ins with [Darrell] Waltrip. … But I think those were more about competition than they were [personal] feuds. We were just going out and trying to beat everybody.
“But with Allison, that was a completely different situation. I was trying to win; he was trying to win. … It got pretty bad there for a while.”
Therein lies the King’s lesson for Busch and Keselowski or anyone else thinking about revenge and/or fueling their private feuds these days on the race track. Don’t do it, he said. It’s too costly—both for the driver in terms of what it might mean in the overall big picture of the point standings and for the car owners in terms of how much cash it consumes to fix up the seemingly unending stream of damaged race cars.
Of how he and Allison eventually came to relatively peaceful terms, Petty laughed and said, “We finally figure we’ve got to stop this before we hurt ourselves or somebody else. We’re tearing up too much equipment, man. He was tearing up Junior Johnson’s equipment and I was tearing up my own equipment. I said, ‘That has got to stop.’
“Plus we were fortunate in that most of the time when we crashed, we only crashed each other and kept others out of it. But any time you’ve got that much going on, and Browns jersey it’s mostly at the front of the pack, you’re eventually going to get other people who are innocent involved. We called a halt to it and went on down the road.”
That’s sound advice for the boys, if they are listening. But if they aren’t, it might be more interesting for the rest of us who are watching.
The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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