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 | Darlington Raceway
1301 Harry Byrd Highway
Darlington, SC 29532
Darlington Raceway is a race track built for NASCAR racing located near Darlington, South Carolina. It was the first superspeedway built with NASCAR racing in mind. Races held here include NASCAR NEXTEL Cup, NASCAR Busch Series, NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and IRL (Indy Racing League). Here are a few facts about the Raceway: | Darlington Raceway, the track "Too Tough to Tame", is of a unique somewhat egg-shaped design, an oval with the ends of very different configurations, a condition which supposedly arose from the proximity of one of end of the track a minnow pond the owner refused to relocate. This situation makes it very challenging for the crews to set up their cars' handling in a way that will be effective at both ends.
In recent years the track has been reconfigured; what was the front stretch is now the back stretch, and the turns have been renumbered accordingly. Seating has been increased to approximately 60,000; it has been limited by the proximity of a railroad track to the facility, a highway behind the back stretch, and the still-present pond.
The track is now owned by International Speedway Corporation, which is controlled by NASCAR's founding France family, so this can be done without incurring legal problems which have sometimes resulted from NASCAR's attempts to move races in the past at tracks which it did not control.
The Joe Weatherly Stock Car Museum and NMPA Hall of Fame
A walk through the Weatherly Museum is not only a trip through the history of Darlington Raceway, but of the entire sport. On the end of a line of classic cars, looking like a prop from a 1940s film, sits the 1950 Plymouth Johnny Mantz drove to Victory Lane in the very first Mountain Dew Southern 500.
| History
In the fall of 1949, when a crisp breeze toyed with the loose soil of an old cotton field on the westside of rural Darlington, SC, Harold Brasington saw more than just dirt dancing around that patch of land. He saw the future. He saw stock cars.
Brasington, a local businessman, had a lofty vision that most of his peers dismissed as utterly ridiculous. His friends laughed at him when returned home from the 1933 Indianapolis 500 and mentioned the idea of little ol' Darlington having a paved superspeedway, a place to hold big-time stock car events. They nearly committed him when he told them that he was going to build it. Nevertheless, believing that Bill France's fledgling NASCAR just might catch on, Brasington set out in the fall of 1949 to shape a 1-1/4 mile speedway on land that had once produced peanuts and cotton.
The first race was scheduled for Labor Day 1950, and when the day finally came the stands overflowed. Brasington expected no more than 10,000 fans, but the crowd of over 25,000 shocked him. Fans practically stood on top of each other and they scaled the fence just for a glimpse of the action.
Californian Johnny Mantz drove to victory that day in the first Southern 500, which took over 6 hours to complete but set a precedent for a sport that would grow to be one of the largest spectator sports in the country. Mantz started dead last in the field of 75 racers, many of whom had never raced on asphalt, but roared to the checkered flag averaging a blistering 76 mph. Over the next fifty years, names like Baker, Flock, Thomas, Pearson, Yarborough, Petty, and Earnhardt became commonplace in Victory Lane.
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