KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Darlington Raceway calls itself the “Too Tough To Tame” track, and no one has dared to question that motto over the decades.
But is it NASCAR’s the hardest oval? We surveyed a third of the typical NASCAR Cup Series field – a dozen drivers – and, well… yeah.
“Darlington will probably be your winner,” Joey Logano said with a laugh.
NASCAR’s next stop on the Cup Series circuit, the venerable 1.366-mile egg-shaped track in South Carolina, received 7.5 of 12 votes in our poll. And while that doesn’t seem like an overwhelming majority, no other track received more than two votes.
“It can be specific to the driver in terms of what is difficult for one person versus another,” Chase Elliott said. “But generally speaking, Darlington is a really tough place, and I don’t think there are many guys here who would tell you otherwise.”
Several drivers took long pauses – roughly the equivalent of saying “Darlington” six times – while they considered the question. A couple asked for clarification on the definition of “hardest” oval, as that could mean either their own skills or the overall difficulty. And these can be very different.
“Just going around the track, Darlington is tough from a challenge standpoint,” Chase Briscoe said. “Like (Xfinity Series rookie) Shane van Gisbergen, I’m like, ‘Man, it’s going to be tough to show up and be good. »
“But for me personally, Loudon (New Hampshire) is the hardest place to get around. It’s flat, awkward, rough. I always had trouble there.
Likewise, the question led Bubba Wallace to imagine what might happen if seven-time Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton came to run a NASCAR season.
“Throw Lewis in a Cup car on an oval – that’s what I think of,” Wallace said. “Finding speed at Dover is going to be very difficult, but then (it’s also difficult to) find the pace you need at Darlington to be OK.”
Darlington’s active win leader Denny Hamlin, Tyler Reddick, Ryan Blaney and Ross Chastain also named the “Lady in Black” as the most difficult oval. But why? What makes this so?
It starts with Darlington’s famous differently shaped ends. Turns 1 and 2 are more traditionally rounded corners, and turns 3 and 4 are tighter with a steeper exit thanks to track designer Harold Brasington’s requirement to avoid a neighbor’s minnow pond during construction.
Additionally, a track designed for 1950s stock cars was never intended to accommodate today’s modern racing machines. Over the years, drivers discovered that the quickest way to get around the track was to run as close to the wall as possible (without receiving the “Darlington stripe” for their efforts); anything less in today’s NASCAR would mean having no chance of victory.
But climbing the peak requires intense concentration and precision because, as Reddick noted, “the wall is a little undulating.”
“If you come into the corner really chasing the wall, you’ll end up hitting it about a third of the way around,” he said. “The first time you go it can really put you off. You think, “Oh, I can just run against the wall…” and boom, you reach it.
And then there is the extremely abrasive surface, which causes significant tire wear. Blaney said drivers are “mentally exhausted” after the race because it’s difficult to find a rhythm when they can’t run the same way every lap. As the tires continue to fall off and the cars lose a tenth of a second or two every lap, they have to constantly recalculate.
“As a driver, how can you continue to respect the limit while understanding how far back you have to go each lap to not exceed that limit? » said Blaney. “You’re like, ‘OK, how can I drive differently for tire grip now versus what I had in the last lap?’ »
“It’s a difficult thing, and then you’re doing it inches from the wall and there’s no room for error.”
But even if Darlington’s robustness is indisputable, his selection was not unanimous. In the “other people receiving votes” category, William Byron and Carson Hocevar said Charlotte was a sneakily difficult track (“overlooked because it was super difficult,” as Hocevar put it).
Byron said: “It’s very bumpy and this car is really stiff, so Charlotte is one of the toughest places we’re going to now because it’s a high level of engagement and not a ton of crashes. There, the car is at the edge.
Austin Dillon said the “edginess” of Texas, a track that lures drivers into a false sense of security before sending their cars for a spin, is also a tough place to race. And Chris Buescher, despite being a former Bristol winner, said the Tennessee short track is tough because drivers have to do 500 laps flat out there, which will “wear you out flat.”
“Well, except for that last Bristol,” he said with a smile, referring to the excessive tire wear situation seen at the March race there.
Of course, neither Buescher nor any of his colleagues in the NASCAR driver corps will be too surprised to learn that most of them have chosen Darlington as their primary challenge.
Although Elliott wondered if there might also be another factor, given the timing of our survey.
“Well, (the Darlington race is this) week,” he said. “So it’s fresh on everyone’s mind.”
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(Top photo from last year’s Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway: James Gilbert/Getty Images)