1,000 Greatest Drivers: Lee Petty
The way he denied Richard his first win was really petty.
Alternate subtitle: It was petty of me to not finish this article yesterday. If I had, I would’ve noted that yesterday was the 15th anniversary of what will unfortunately be my biggest claim to fame for the rest of my life, winning the Ultimate Typing Championship and horrifically becoming a semi-viral sensation. I would say the comments sections on those videos were when I really started disliking Internet culture for the first time, and that has escalated in the years since. I just deactivated both my Bluesky account and my eponymous Twitter account a few days ago, and I’ll probably deactivate my racermetrics Twitter too if I ever stop being locked out of it. I might be more inclined to promote my work on my YouTube more (where I have a larger presence) or on Facebook, which I’ve actually warmed to more recently as I grow old and lonely and see how much more important local connections are.
I know many of you will likely be watching the 12 Hours of Sebring as I post this. I will not be because I still need to focus on clearing out the house so my mom will hopefully come home soon, but there might not be a lot I can do right now since my second dumpster still hasn’t arrived yet. I also will have my RotoBaller columns to write and some other work to do as well, but I might try and get the Greg Murphy column done later today so I can fill a couple empty spaces I have on Sunday and Monday with some substantially bigger names.
I haven’t really decided whether to give Petty any top five seasons or not. I did rank top fives for every year starting with 1960, but any of the years Petty might be deserving of that came before that year. I think his competition was probably too bad in 1959 for me to put him in my top five for that year, but that also seems like a pretty shallow year everywhere to be honest because Juan Manuel Fangio had just retired and his successor F1 champion Mike Hawthorn had just died, while that was the year just before A.J. Foyt started dominating in IndyCar, so it’s possible Petty could wind up in my top five just because there are so few deserving contenders in a year where the competition everywhere was pretty shallow.
