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

Mother's Day miracle
And then there was Mother's Day, a slot on the calendar that made people in the industry shudder. Everyone remembered the debacle in Atlanta. Former Darlington president Andrew Gurtis, who succeeded Hunter, tried to run a Craftsman Truck race on the Saturday before Mother's Day in 2001, and the event flopped at the ticket office. Into this environment stepped Browning, who became track president in 2004 after Gurtis took a job within ISC.

Browning's previous job? General manager of North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham. He had already seen one track fold on his watch, and didn't want to endure the process a second time.

"I don't think anybody would have been surprised if I had said I was a little gun shy," he said. "But that was the situation we were put in. We all sat down and put together a game plan around Mother's Day, trying to turn it into a positive. We focused on the things we could control, and didn't worry about the things we couldn't control. People were always talking about how we were being set up to fail, and all those other rumors that were out there floating around. We just tried to concentrate on what we knew we could do, and luckily it's turned out to be a home run."

Darlington's first Mother's Day weekend race, in 2005, sold out a week in advance. That was enough for ISC to earmark money for a new grandstand in Turn 1, raising the track's capacity by 3,000 seats. Last season the facility sold out two weeks early, and suddenly everyone from Browning on down could feel a loosening of the figurative noose that had been around Darlington's neck for years.

"That was the greatest feeling, to have been able to accomplish that last year," Browning said. "That's when all of us collectively had a big sigh of relief and said, 'This is real. We can do this. This is going to be all right.'"

And this year brings a third consecutive sellout, even in an atmosphere where some tracks are struggling to draw a full house. Watkins, the mayor, said the track has never had a closer identity with the town. There's never been more corporate involvement. There aren't people taking the facility for granted, or simply waiting for it to die.

"Those folks are passionate about that place," said Gurtis, now deputy operations director at ISC. "That was at the local level, at the state level, and certainly the folks at the track, and the fans responded to it. Looking at the track at Rockingham and going back to [North] Wilkesboro, they had seen what happens if you don't line up and get behind the track. So it's very encouraging to Chris Browning and the team at Darlington that all those folks continue to show their support. That's weighing heavily in their long-term prognosis."

The people in Darlington can breathe -- but they can't rest. The place may seem safe for the first time in a long time, but Hunter cautions that there are still bigger tracks out there wanting NASCAR races or second Nextel Cup dates. No one can get lazy. After all, Hunter warns, that's what got Darlington into trouble in the first place.

"You still need the people in this area and the people in this state to support this facility, because there are other facilities around the country now that could take another race and sell 100,000 tickets," he said. "That's what happened to this place years ago. When Daytona Speedway was built, this racetrack, the Southern 500, was the biggest stock-car race in the country. Daytona started promoting from Day 1. This place sat here and sat here and sat here. And that can happen again."