Nascar Race Today

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - Each Friday afternoon, we'll look at a hot topic in NASCAR and preview the weekend's race:

Having been to most of the NASCAR venues, and all of them during that rich period in the late 1980s and early 1990s where historic tracks were mixed among the modern ones, I'm occasionally asked which is my favorite.

Darlington is the easy answer.

Darlington, even with a reconfiguration, gives you the sense of history that a Fenway Park or Wrigley Field or Madison Square Garden provides. This was the original NASCAR track and the ultimate, a little lopsided and a little funky. The ghosts of NASCAR are still there. You can feel it.

You think of the "Darlington Stripe," the inevitable swath of paint that a car leaves along the wall. Think of the old turn 4, sliding so far toward the wall as almost to kiss it with the right rear quarterpanel and propelling the car back into the middle.

My first Darlington, my great friend from the Chattanooga paper, the late Conner Gilbert, were poolside late one evening at our motel. There were kids loudly splashing in the pool. One swam over to apologize if they were making too much noise. The kids were named Kelly and Dale. We had just bumped into their father and had a brief conversation at the ice machine. Guy named Dale Earnhardt Sr.

There was the night at a fancy Florence, S.C., dining with a track PR guy and two of my friends, a husband and wife. A very married driver stopped by our table to say hello, then later got the PR guy off to the side to inquire just how very married the pretty woman at our table happened to be.

There was the greatest press box of all time, perched right above turn 1,where it seemed cars were coming straight at you. The old days, they told me, they issued goggles to writers in the press box because of the tire dust and other dirt flying into the box.

I love my wi-fi and air conditioning in a press box. But I'm a bit wistful I never covered a car race in goggles.

Bojangles Southern 500. Darlington Raceway, Darlington, S.C. Saturday, 5:30 p.m. CDT, Fox TV.

Matt Kenseth

To continue on the nostalgia theme the Darlington prompts, Friday night's Nationwide race will help mark the 50th anniversary of the Ford Mustang, which is Ford's entry in that series, and Chris Buescher is in a specially designed Mustang to honor that anniversary.

The Mustang was unveiled April 13, 1964 at the New York World's Fair and four days later the first ones were sold. There were 420,000 Mustangs sold that first year.

You could have had a '64 Mustang for $2,320 that year. Or you can have one now for $40,000, according to one eBay entry.

In last Friday's Green Flag, we asked what needed to be done to improve competition. Some 34 percent said removing restrictor plates would be the best idea, but 28 percent said that no changes were needed.

<a href="http://ift.tt/1sN3sfR">What's your favorite old-school NASCAR track?</a> The track:

Darlington Raceway is often described as egg-shaped, as it isn't symmetrical at each end. That's because the builder, Harold Brasington, had to narrow one end of the track because of neighboring "Ramsey's Pond." The property was a peanut farm owned by J.S. Ramsey. That Brasington may have acquired the property in a poker game is only part of Darlington's rich lore.

It is a 1.33-mile oval in the center of South Carolina, the first fully paved track in NASCAR, where despite the size, "The sensation of speed here is higher than any other track we go to," Jimmie Johnson says.

"It's been around a long time. One of the toughest race tracks physically that we race on, tough track mentally," says Dale Earnhardt Jr. "Five hundred miles here is a really long race because the track is quite a big race track and the pace slows down. You are working so hard in the corner so just one lap around here is a lot of work. To have to run 500 miles it's a pretty tough test of man and machine."

Jeff Gordon, the winningest active driver at Darlington with seven wins there, Denny Hamlin and Greg Biffle.

Our pick to win:

Jeff Gordon. (We're on a roll ... or at we least finally one right. Joey Logano was our pick last week at Texas.)