This fall they ran the Southern 500 at Darlington, as usual, and during early September I had some thoughts about how it was when I started out and how it is now.
The Labor Day weekend race is one of our major events today, but nothing to compare with how important it was once upon a time.
Daddy drove in the first Southern 500 in 1950 and, until 1959 when Daytona opened, Darlington was our only superspeedway. The first race at Daytona was 1959, and then Charlotte and Atlanta opened in 1960.
I guess the thing I remember most about the first races at Darlington is that nobody could find a tire that would last. Everybody was tearing up tires. There was a joke about parking your street car far enough away from the track so your tires wouldn't get stolen and used on a race car.
I remember Daddy fixed a cooling device. He had a place under the hood and right-front fender where he would put dry ice. The wind would blow over the ice and be cooler than normal when it got to the right-front tire.
It was 500 miles back then, too, but it seemed like such a long race, and it was. The cars were running only 100 mph during the first few races.
Daddy ran all the races, but we really looked forward to Darlington because it was our one big race. Some drivers back then didn't run all the races, and they would come to Darlington on Sunday or Monday before qualifying and begin testing, if you could call it that. Anyway, they would get in some extra practice time.
I remember, too, that you could do all the practice runs you wanted, and Saturday afternoon the track would close. We couldn't get on the track on Sunday, and track officials would put down a sealer over the asphalt. We called it "bear grease." This stuff changed everything. The way your car was handling on Friday would be nothing close to the way it would handle when the race started. And that stuff was so slick you could hardly walk on it. That ought to tell you something about driving on it.
There was one year, I think about a year before I started racing, that Daddy found about three feet of extra asphalt right at the top of the track, next to the wall. There was more banking in this little section than the rest of the track. We kept it a big secret, and Daddy used this small section of asphalt in the race. It helped, too.
There wasn't a wall around the track, just in front of the grandstand. There was a guardrail. Drivers got the "Darlington Stripe" going into Turn 3 because you would drive into the turn right against the guardrail and scrape the railing. That is Turn 2 now and there's a wall.
Another thing that made Darlington special back then was that we were running some races where we had only 20 cars. Then you go to Darlington and there would be 75 or more cars, and they would start the field three abreast.
For a long time there wasn't a wall between the pits and the racetrack. The cars pitted on the edge of the track. They built the wall between the track and the pits after a couple of cars spun into the pits and killed some people.