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."

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."

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."