(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)
By Aaron Bearden
In the 1971 Uriah Heep hit “Lady in Black,” a man wanders through the darkness of a war-torn land until he’s comforted by a goddess-like woman who consoles him and inspires him to march on.
“‘Oh, lady, lend your hand,’ I cried.
“’Oh let me rest here at your side.’
“‘Have faith and trust in me,’ she said
“And filled my heart with life.”
Seven decades after the track’s inception, NASCAR is leaning on its own Lady in Black to carry the sport out of the darkness and into an unknown new world.
NASCAR teams will make the fateful march to Darlington Raceway three times over the next four days, contesting the first races its held since the COVID-19 pandemic brought all sports to a halt in the middle of March. The NASCAR Cup Series will hold two races on Sunday and Wednesday, with the Xfinity Series making a one-off trip on Tuesday.
The races are part of a radically-altered schedule that’ll see NASCAR run primarily within driving distance of its Charlotte, North Carolina base over the next two months.
Attendance at the events will be severely limited – no fans are permitted, media and track personnel are minimal and FOX Sports’ broadcasting team will call the races from the company studio in Charlotte. The estimated 900 people on site will be forced to follow social distancing protocols, with even the winning teams planned to maintain distance from their drivers at race’s end.
But while few people will be at the venue itself, the entire sports world will be watching from afar.
NASCAR is among the first major sporting organizations to return to action, springing to life on the same weekend as Germany’s Bundesliga in the soccer world. A few grassroots racing tours have kicked things off sooner, most notably the World of Outlaws, but only the UFC’s come to life quicker when looking at America’s top sports entities.
Most traditional sports have the resources to wait out this break and err on the side of safety. Leagues like the NBA, MLB and NFL are used to longer breaks and have owners with extreme wealth that can wait out the current shutdown.
Motorsports entities find themselves in a comparably precarious position. Many teams and tracks lack the resources to sustain operations during a lengthy hiatus and therefore risk shutting down completely if racing doesn’t resume soon. Such was the case for ARCA’s KBR Development, which shuttered just two months after fielding Knoxville Nationals winner David Gravel in his first stock car race at Daytona International Speedway.
The decision to return early isn’t a case of being opportunistic – though the chance to catch more fans is certainly there.
It’s a move for survival.
What better place to come back, then, than Darlington?
The 1.366-mile oval is among NASCAR’s most historic venues, with a rich past that dates back to Harold Brasington’s decision to create the track in the late-1940s.
Brasington crafted the racing surface with a unique vision, hoping to split the gap between Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s large, paved surface and the dirt short tracks that littered the south at the time. His experiment resulted in a unique egg-shaped oval – fueled partially by an agreement not to destroy a nearby minnow pond – and Brasington quickly set about creating the south’s own 500-mile race.
The event could have failed, but NASCAR came onboard. Despite Big Bill France’s initial fears that stock cars of the time would struggle to survive for 500 miles, the Southern 500 was born – and with it, NASCAR’s steady push toward longer events.
From that moment on, Darlington became an instrumental part of the NASCAR schedule. The Southern 500 was a crown jewel, but even the track’s secondary spring race was an important one for drivers keen to master the challenging oval.
But despite the rich history and transformative effect Darlington had on NASCAR, there was a time when the track seemed due to be put out to pasture.
In the midst of the sport’s boom period of the 1990s and 2000s, NASCAR began to eschew trips to some of its historic facilities in favor of larger tracks with larger markets and greater attendance capacities. North Wilkesboro Speedway fell off the calendar in 1996, and Rockingham’s North Carolina Speedway followed in 2004.
Darlington remained, but its spotlight dwindled. The two traditional dates were cut to one starting in 2005, and the lone remaining race was moved from Labor Day weekend to early May. The Southern 500 name even disappeared for a short stretch in the mid-2000s.
The result was a lull in the track’s prevalence in the motorsports world. Veteran journalist Ed Hinton mourned the lost Labor Day tradition while covering another rich event in Indianapolis, and the track was relegated to being just another forgotten spring trip on the calendar.
Darlington was nearly left for dead.
But the South Carolina staple kept afloat, and NASCAR’s vision slowly came back to it.
The Southern 500 name returned in 2009, when a veteran Mark Martin prevailed in a Cup race at the track for the first time since 1993. The event returned to its Labor Day date in 2015, complete with a new throwback weekend gimmick that saw teams and fans pay homage to NASCAR’s history with retro clothes and paint schemes.
Five years after that return, Darlington has rightfully taken its place as one of the crown jewel tracks of NASCAR. The Southern 500 stands tall with the Daytona 500, Coca-Cola 600 and Bristol Night Race as a premier event, and it’s even been placed in the 10-race playoff schedule as of this season.
In need of a place to restart competition, NASCAR looked to South Carolina’s iconic track. The secondary spring race will return for the first time in 16 years, and a second spring event will follow on Wednesday.
Less than two decades after it felt like an afterthought on the Cup schedule, Darlington is one of the most important tracks NASCAR has. A facility once barely looked upon will have the entire sporting world watching it for the next four days.
The Lady in Black is alive and well.
