The concrete floor in the reaper shed where Lee Petty first began building stock cars remains six inches off from one side of the room to the other just as it did the day Richard Petty and his brother, Maurice, poured it almost 50 years ago.

One wall is the brick outside of another building constructed adjacent to the shed. On the other side of a pair of sealed garage doors is another building.

The additions run on and on like a maze, covering about 20,000 square feet of property on the farm land next to the house where “The King” of stock car racing was born.

This is Petty Enterprises.

This slice of history off Branson Mill Road in Level Cross, N.C., looks more like a museum than a race shop compared to the spacious, state-of-the-art facilities used by most NASCAR Nextel Cup teams.

“I see all these big fancy shops in Charlotte (N.C.) and people ask us why we don’t move, but this is our home,” said Richard Petty, who won all seven of his Cup titles out of these buildings. “My daddy raced cars from here, I raced from here and we’ve always been here. It’s who we are.

“You come up here, and it’s like walking into history.”

Petty Enterprises is one of the last NASCAR teams to hang onto this kind of history.

But history doesn’t win races. It’s been six years since Petty Enterprises sent a car to Victory Lane. Richard’s son, Kyle, hasn’t won since he rejoined the family business in 1997.

As NASCAR race teams build huge facilities, Petty Enterprises still resides where it began in Lee Petty's shop, where crew chief John Hayworth, right, talks with Brembo North America representative David Grimshaw. Petty Enterprises has continued to add on as needed, but it sits beside the home in which Richard Petty grew up in Level Cross, N.C.

“It’s not the walls or the building,” said Kyle, who runs the day-to-day operations at Petty Enterprises. “It’s not the paint on the building. I could go build a brand-new shop and run it exactly the way I’m running it today. That would just be money spent on the shop and not on the car.”

John Hayworth pointed toward the ceiling at wires that once supported fenders and hoods in what was the Chrysler Barn during the days Petty Enterprises stored most of the Chrysler parts for NASCAR.

He then moved to the newest section of the facility where employees were busy working on Kyle’s No. 45 Dodge Charger and the 43 car of Jeff Green.

“If we want glitz we can go to the new building and hang out if we feel like it,” Hayworth said. “You’ve got a little bit of old buildings, a little bit of new, a little bit of old guys, a little bit of new guys.

“This is like a Lambeau Field to us. It’s everything you’d ever need.”

The new building would fit inside the paint room at Penske Racing South, which recently opened a 424,697-square-foot shop near Charlotte that has a 138-seat cafeteria, a 150-seat auditorium and nine conference rooms.

The closest thing Petty Enterprises has to an auditorium is a small table in the middle of the engineering department where videos are projected onto a white wall.

Richie Barsz, 62, has been with Petty Enterprises since 1970, longer than any fulltime employee outside the Petty family.

Other shops near Charlotte are just as fancy. Dale Earnhardt Inc.’s facility is so spectacular that it was dubbed the “Garage Mahal.” Joe Gibbs Racing recently added a 105,000-square-foot addition to its state-of-the-art, 120,000-square-foot facility.

“When you come to Petty Enterprises and the buildings are 50 years old you look at it and say, ‘This isn’t the Garage Mahal. How do they compete with the same stuff?'” Kyle Petty said.

“At the same time, when you look at the stuff we have and the tools we have, we have basically the same tools.”

Richie Barsz, 62, knows this as well. He has been with Petty Enterprises since 1970, longer than any full-time employee outside the Petty family.

“It doesn’t matter where you build race cars,” Richard Petty said. “These guys in Charlotte have really nice shops with all the glitz and glamour, but when you get to the track we all pull into a little concrete square-sized garage and go to work on them. We’re all the same then.”