DARLINGTON, S.C. -- Tuesday night brought the town's social event of the year, a gathering of restaurateurs at the racetrack for the Taste of Darlington. Wednesday brought a block party on the town square, complete with fireworks and a parade of Nextel Cup transporters. In this small community the pre-race festivities go on as they always have, with one notable exception.

The fear is gone.

The fear that for so long loomed over this South Carolina town like a guillotine blade, consuming local politicians and worrying merchants, has disappeared into the night. After a decade of living with the dread that NASCAR would leave Darlington Raceway as it had so many other tracks in the rural South, locals see the lights, see the sold-out crowds on Mother's Day weekend, see the financial commitment, and begin to breathe again.

"It's just a big sigh of relief that it seems to have developed into a stable situation," Darlington mayor Tony Watkins said. "Mother's Day was something we really worried about at the beginning. Would people attend a Mother's Day race? Would they want to be home with their families? The fans have responded. I think a lot of them are from this area, people who did not go when you had two races. I guess you took it for granted. Now you don't. I think it's a blessing to know it's going to continue, and we feel much more secure as a community."

Saturday night, the Nextel Cup cars will take the green flag at a Darlington event sold out for the third consecutive season. Parent company International Speedway Corp. has pumped $20 million into the facility since 2004, adding lights and a new grandstand, with a new racing surface, entrance tunnel and other improvements on the way. This at the same facility that struggled to sell tickets year after year, that lost its venerable Southern 500 and Labor Day weekend, that lived under the threat of schedule realignment for so long it came to seem a way of life.

Darlington is a town where jaded residents thought they were being set up to fail when NASCAR took their one remaining race date and plunked it on the Saturday before Mother's Day, a weekend the sport had shied away from for nearly two decades, since the attendance disaster that was The Winston at Atlanta in 1986. And now, suddenly, this 58-year-old speedway that once teetered on the brink of obsolescence is facing a future more secure than it's seen in decades.

It's a product of schedule realignment working, cutting ticket demand from 120,000 annually to a more manageable 63,000. It's a product of the phenomenon that is night racing, and pleasant weather on the Saturday before Mother's Day. It's a product of people and circumstances aligning to rescue the site of NASCAR's first event on a paved track and first 500-mile race, a venue once so weed-infested and dilapidated there seemed no way it could compete with the modern palaces springing up in big cities around the country.

"From our company's standpoint, all the indicators are very positive. We're talking about things five years and more down the road," track president Chris Browning said. "The investment this year, with the tunnel and the paving and the pit road and everything, that's a huge investment. There are always going to be people out there that are going to lump us into that endangered group. That's their prerogative. But if we just keep focusing on the things that we're doing, the results are going to speak for themselves. The fans are showing their support." (Continued)