David Pearson and his generation of stock-car racers had a special word for it — “fenderprints,” comparing the bewitching art of hustling a car around Darlington Raceway to finger-painting with a metal body panel. Pearson would know, as a South Carolina native, a NASCAR Hall of Famer and one of the track’s all-time royals with a record 10 Cup Series victories there.
“You could see paint in two places,” Pearson told the Florence Morning News in 1999. “First, when you were driving around the race track in the race car, you’d see different colors of paint on the guard rail. You could also take a stroll in the garage area and look at the right-rear quarterpanels of the car. Sure enough, there would be black marks on the rear quarterpanels.”
The custom of fenderprints has been around ever since Harold Brasington first opened the track’s doors for business in 1950. That tradition has spanned all seven generations of NASCAR stocker, and its name is synonymous with racing on the ragged edge of velocity and bravery. It’s also an initiation into an exclusive society that walks the fine line between derring-do and damage.
It’s now and always known as the “Darlington Stripe.”
Darlington Raceway continues the celebration of its 75th anniversary season this weekend with drivers ready to leave their literal and figurative marks on Sunday’s Goodyear 400 (3 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
PHOTOS: Darlington Stripe through the years | Paint Scheme Preview
Woe betide the track’s workers, tasked with keeping the outside retaining walls coated with fresh paint after each day of NASCAR’s Throwback Weekend, when the sport’s best christen the barrier with scuff marks in the continual search for speed at one of the circuit’s most difficult layouts. Making fast time around the track labeled “Too Tough to Tame” is like trying to fold a fitted bedsheet: Good luck being meticulous. Expect wrinkles.
“I left a lot of blue paint on that wall,” King Richard Petty reminisced during last month’s unveiling of an anniversary exhibit at the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Petty was fortunate and talented enough to be a three-time winner during his long career, one where he gathered his share of Darlington Stripes along the way.
His son, Kyle, has fewer endearing memories of navigating the lopsided oval, and his assessment of Darlington’s dastardly side became the 1995 equivalent of meme-worthy in a post-crash interview.
“I’ve said it before, I think they ought to fill this place up with water to the outside retaining wall, dump bass in it and have pro bass tournaments in here and sell seats in the grandstands right there, let people just watch them fish all day long,” Petty told ESPN. “Be fine with me, but I’ll tell you this, as bad as this place is, you could stock this thing with a million fish. Wouldn’t nobody catch one.”
Drivers from the front of the field to the back of the pack have been humbled by the ever-evolving Darlington Stripe for generations. With the track’s diamond-anniversary celebration already in full swing, the tales those imposing walls could tell are worth the retelling.
“I left a lot of paint on that guard rail over the years,” veteran Dave Marcis said, referencing his history of fenderprints in 1999, “but it was not a work of art.”
‘The greatest test of raw nerve’
When Glen Wood showed up for the 1965 Southern 500, his family-owned team brought a brand-new No. 21 Ford in a deep shade of red that resembled a candied apple. Marvin Panch put the Wood Brothers’ entry on the second row in qualifying, and the team’s prospects that year looked as good as the car.
“It’s the prettiest car we’ve ever had,” Glen Wood said, “but I know the side will get crushed at Darlington.”
Panch’s engine expired before any substantial damage could be done, but such were the team’s expectations for right-side scrapes from what the sport’s pioneers termed “old Darlington.”
In those days, the “Darlington Stripe” more commonly referred to a section of what was then Turn 3. The order of the turns shifted after officials moved the start/finish line to the other side of the track in 1997, so it’s now Turn 1 on the wider-arcing eastern side of the course.
Back then, the track was ringed with curved guard rail, and the groove — hard as it is to imagine — was even more narrow than it is today. Touching the wall and earning a stripe was almost regarded as a performance advantage; skilled drivers would tick, tap or glance off the rail, which was viewed as a necessary trade-off in order to carry the prerequisite amount of speed to be competitive.
“It was a one-groove race track back then and you could pick up speed especially in the old Turns 3 and 4 by hitting the wall and bouncing off,” Pearson said in 1999. “I think all of us would put extra braces on the right-rear of the car because we knew we’d be hitting that railing a few times.”
According to Darlington folklore, Red Byron — the first NASCAR Cup Series champion — was the first to discover the performance merits of acquiring a stripe, bruising his Raymond Parks-owned Cadillac to a third-place finish in the first Southern 500 back in 1950. Amazingly, officials started 75 cars that day, then came back the next year with an 82-car field.
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Still, the track’s history books don’t have an official account for where the phrase “Darlington Stripe” originated. One of the first known references in newsprint came in 1963 from raceway publicist Russ Catlin, who told the Columbia Record that “usually when a driver takes the third turn, known to many as the Darlington Stripe, he will sideswipe the rail if he’s going at too high a speed.”
During that era, the starting grid was often dotted by cars with pre-emptive stripes, decorated by drivers who tangled with the barrier in practice or qualifying sessions. While Pearson suggested reinforcing the right side of his cars, Fireball Roberts had a more novel idea: “If I could put roller skates on the side of my car, the turn would be perfect.”
“The third turn at Darlington is the greatest test of raw nerve at any race track, anywhere,” said Bobby Isaac, who eventually became a Hall of Famer but was still an up-and-comer when he spoke with the Greensboro News & Record in 1964. “You have to get the feel of that corner. You have to feel the car slap up against the wall for that brief moment before you know inside yourself that you’re really running hard.”
Press pundits predicted that the Darlington Stripe would cease to exist in 1969 after a repaving and renovation project. When the new asphalt was sealed, officials made a slight increase to the banking and widened the racing surface spanning Turns 3 and 4. The track was remeasured the following year, and the 1 3/8-mile length was adjusted to the 1.366 miles that’s been the listed distance to this day.
Instead of fading away, the Darlington Stripe merely switched corners. As speeds increased through the decades, so did the tendency for cars to rap the barrier at nearly every turn.
“You ask me how I drive Darlington? Well, I’ll tell you,” Richard Petty told The Charlotte News in 1971. “I drive into the first turn and then I hit the wall, and I go down the backstretch and I get through the third turn and then I go into the fourth turn and I hit the wall twice.”
Darlington’s design went without major changes until the 2004 season, when officials installed the Steel And Foam Energy Reduction (SAFER) barrier system as a safety measure. The crash-absorbing outer wall was met with some initial criticism from the old guard, wary about how the already narrow racing surface would be reduced nearly 30 inches by the extra buffer.
“The potential is there for a lot more Darlington Stripes,” Ricky Craven told The State in 2004, a year after his legendary victory over Kurt Busch at the track. “It’s going to be challenging. I’m not going to pretend that it’s not. On the flip side, I’m not going to take issue with a change or an effort to make the sport safer. That doesn’t make sense.”
As usual, NASCAR’s top drivers adapted. The current age of stock-car pilots still press the boundaries of tenacity and fender durability with each hot-paced lap around the joint.
The track may have evolved through the years, but the formula for making time there hasn’t. It’s a recipe that’s kept drivers on alert and kept fans coming back for decades, and it’s unlikely to ever change.
“No one would dare touch up the Mona Lisa,” Darrell Waltrip told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “The track at Darlington shouldn’t be tampered with either.”
‘Rite of passage’
Chase Briscoe remembers the time he earned his first Darlington Stripe. Late in his first full season of Xfinity Series competition in 2019, he finished a respectable sixth, but not before cresting the edge of control while racing one of the sport’s superstars.
Briscoe’s first Darlington victory came less than a year later after an emotional late-race battle with Kyle Busch. His most recent Darlington triumph was another memorable one, a playoff-clinching win in 2024 that gave Stewart-Haas Racing its final Victory Lane visit in the Cup Series. But his recollection of that first scrape at Darlington still stands out, like a letter of acceptance into a secret society.
“I survived practice and qualifying, didn’t get one,” said Briscoe, who is primed for his first Darlington start with Joe Gibbs Racing this weekend. “In the race, I got one racing with Dale (Earnhardt) Jr., and I was like, ‘Man, that’s like a rite of passage right there. Like, I got my first Darlington Stripe racing against Dale Jr.’ But yeah, I remember it being like, OK, it’s not as bad as I thought. I hadn’t really ran at that point anywhere where you ran on the fence other than Homestead, and my one start there, I never got in the wall, so I didn’t really know what it was going to be like to get in the fence. And now, I mean, you use it all the time.”
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Other remembrances from current drivers are less fond. AJ Allmendinger has 13 Darlington starts on his Cup Series resume, dating back to 2007 and his debut with Team Red Bull. He’s still looking for his first top-10 finish there, but the hunt for his first Darlington Stripe wasn’t a prolonged search.
“It was the first lap I got out there,” Allmendinger says. “Yeah, I think when I was in the 84 (Red Bull) car, the second lap I hit the wall in practice, and they’re like, ‘Nah, it’s fine. You’re supposed to do that.’ Then the third lap, I really hit it, they’re like, ‘OK, that’s still OK.’ And then the fourth lap, I KO’d it, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, kid, that’s too much,’ and to be quite honest, I still feel that way when I show up to that place. I still don’t really know how to get around it. So it is definitely unique.
“I don’t know if I’ll go the extreme of Kyle Petty filling it up with water and doing a bass fishing tournament out of it. It’s definitely a tough race track that I’m constantly still trying to learn how to drive.”
The modern-day crop of Cup Series drivers is a different breed from their old-school predecessors, but twice a year at Darlington, the new school turns back the clock. Fittingly, those two trips are special dates on the NASCAR calendar — this weekend’s official throwback festivities and the traditional Labor Day weekend Southern 500, one of the sport’s first crown-jewel races and the opener to the Cup Series Playoffs.
Darlington has meant plenty to the foundation of stock car racing, ushering in the speedway boom of the 1960s and the sport’s eventual growth toward larger, more modern facilities in the eras that followed. What hasn’t changed in its 75 years is one of the track’s signature traits — the bodywork creases that separate the contenders from the also-rans, the courageous from the meek, and that delicate balance between heartbreak and sheer hustle.
“When I heard about the Darlington Stripe, I remember people calling the drivers artists on asphalt,” nine-time Darlington winner Dale Earnhardt told the Florence Morning News in 1999. “Well, back then, they may have painted a pretty picture, but today, if you get in the wall, your car is going to look abstract. But that’s just a part of Darlington. The track will never change, and as long as race cars keep trying to tame it, the Darlington Stripe will continue to live.”
