Town, track look to future as Darlington thrives anew (cont'd)

Forgotten history
Fans haven't always supported Darlington. Despite having the smallest seating capacity of any oval track on the Nextel Cup circuit, it lingered for nearly a decade without a sellout, an omission that placed it squarely in the realignment crosshairs and made it easy for ISC to ship its fall race to Phoenix in 2004. Market saturation, with Charlotte and Rockingham nearby, hurt the facility at the box office. And the track struggled to recover from management gaffes that left it woefully behind the times.

When ISC purchased the facility from a group of investors in 1982, it had changed very little from the day founder Harold Brasington had finished building it. The facilities were small, access roads were unpaved, drainage was poor and landscaping was nonexistent. The former track president had been hamstrung by shareholders who chose dividend checks over necessary infrastructure improvements. As other tracks were built up, Darlington idled, trying to live off the prestige of the Southern 500 alone.

When current NASCAR vice president Jim Hunter was installed as Darlington's president in 1992, the track couldn't sell out its 28,000 seats. Even though it hosted NASCAR twice a year, the place had become overgrown and largely forgotten in its own state.

"It was things like, they let the grass grow. They didn't cut the grass," Hunter said. "When you bring a potential sponsor in here, you don't want the place looking like a weed yard. When we stumped the state, back 12 or 15 years ago, it was amazing to me the number of people in this state who didn't even know this racetrack was here. They didn't even know it was here. So you've got to stay out in front of it."

The long, difficult task of modernizing the facility fell to Hunter. With no place to add skyboxes, he built suites wherever he could. Inspired by the Masters, he planted azaleas and Bradford pear trees. He planted palmettos not only because they were the state tree, but because he thought people associated them with sunny skies and good weather. He built new facilities, added new seats, flipped the start/finish line and repaved the racing surface. He started the movement toward adding lights, which became a reality three years ago.

But still, sellouts were difficult to come by. In 2003, NASCAR and ISC gave Darlington's Labor Day weekend date to California Speedway in the metro Los Angeles market, shifting the South Carolina track's second date to November. One year later, after the track had built some momentum by selling out its fall race and coming within 2,000 tickets of selling out the following spring event, NASCAR pulled the plug on the Southern 500 to give Phoenix a second date.

The race and weekend that for so long had defined this region were gone, replaced by rampant anxiety and concern. Residents were convinced that it was only a matter of time before Darlington wound up like Rockingham, its sister facility 90 minutes to the north, shut down for good. The fear wracked a community where the sides of police cars are adorned with checkered flags, and a downtown alley features the handprints of past Darlington winners.

"I had people who were very knowledgeable, people who covered sporting events within the journalism profession, tell me point blank that I needed to prepare myself for the loss of this final race, because it's coming," Watkins said. "That was, of course, wrong. I think that word had gotten around that we were going to lose that second race. There was real fear here. I always thought about what happened at Rockingham, and a lot of people said we were going to go the same way." (Continued)