This is first in a series of promised posts about drivers I have rooted for in my attempt to understand why fans root for certain drivers and against others.

The first driver I was ever a fan of was…wait for it…Richard Petty. It feels awful to admit it now. I mean there is nothing edgy or hip about rooting for Richard Petty. Why did I like Petty?

Well, the first race young racefanphd ever watched was the 1981 Daytona 500 (I would have been like 8 or 9 then). Anyway, my dad was both a gearhead and a race fan and had the day off from work that Sunday in winter 1981. He was committed to watching the entire flag to flag telecast without interruption, and my sister and I were given explicit orders to not walk in front of the tv (except during commercials). This was sort of comical in retrospect, as we’d time our trips between the kitchen and living room on one side, and the stairs to go up to our rooms and play on the other, for the commercial breaks in the CBS telecast. Anyway, being a fairly normal 8-year-old boy (we’re using a liberal definition of normal, here), who liked to play with Matchbox cars and Tonka trucks, I found myself watching parts of the race. I still remember the Mike Joy call from the pits on Petty’s last stop — “They’re NOT changing tires” — that allowed him to go on to the win. So, easy answer there – Petty won the first race I ever saw.

As I watched more races in the 1983 and 1984 seasons, I liked the bright colors of the #43 car — that Petty was something of an underdog at this point of his career, as few could compete with Darrell Waltrip in Junior Johnson’s car and Bobby Allison at DiGard during these years — that he had won a lot in the past. And I actually watched the ESPN Rockingham telecast in 1983, where Petty beat the young Bill Elliott (driving the Melling-sponsored “crackerbox” Ford Thunderbird) by a nose. One of the first races I watched on my own…very exciting.

So, nothing earth-shaking there. Those are things that appealed to an impressionable kid, 10-12 years old – a bright colored car, a driver who won, and who was soft-spoken and approachable. Thinking on that, I can see why that so many kids like Jeff Gordon – he’s got a lot of the same attributes.