Spear: Darlington proves as unforgiving as ever

DARLINGTON

IF THE GUYS on the No. 48 team could have looked into the future and brought three race cars to Darlington for this weekend, driver Jimmie Johnson could have gone for the hat trick.

The hat trick ... good in hockey, not in stock-car racing.

Hockey’s version, three goals in a match, leaves the fans cheering. Racing’s equivalent, three wrecked cars in a day, leaves ’em moaning.

And if the guy behind the wheel in two crashes has taken home the past two season championships, questions mount.

Make that singular. One question: What’s going on here?

The repaved Darlington Raceway left racing’s best chauffeurs scratching their heads Friday — and that came before qualifying.

Just imagine the possibilities tonight.

The cars lined up for time trials late in the afternoon with a lot of worse-for-wear looks. Four drivers, including Jimmie Johnson, needed their backup rides.

Some members of the driving fraternity have lobbied for years, begging and pleading for a new paving job to eliminate the dips that make every lap an adventure and soothe the crusty surface that eats tires before their time.

Officials listened, shelled out $10 million to create a nice ride and sat back to watch.

After Friday’s practice sessions, the drivers looked ahead with these words of warning: Be careful what you ask for.

They discovered the delightful truth: Darlington is still Darlington.

No warning. If tonight’s race comes anywhere close to matching two days’ of practice, thrills, spills and chills will be the order of business.

What did you do, Chris Browning? Did you, the president of stock-car racing’s oldest super-speedway, slip a little grease on the 1.366-mile surface?

Browning smiles the smile of a guy with a fistful of aces.

“I felt like wearing black today; I felt like we were going to have a funeral because we killed my favorite race track,” Carl Edwards, a three-time winner this season, said. “But ... the surface is growing on me, so I’m feeling better about it.”

Edwards said during a promotional visit last month that he liked the pre-paving’s character: rough patches, cracked seams and worn-out pavement.

“This is just a real race track,” he said. “It’s really fun and you’ve to really drive on it to make the car go fast.”

Going fast, of course, is the objective on the track, but the grumbles Friday came from those who went too fast.

“If you look through the garage, more cars have hit the wall than not, and I’m in that category,” Kevin Harvick said. “I hit it twice (in practice). It’s not slick; it’s just that you’re riding on the edge, and when you go over the edge, there’s no warning.”

No, there’s only the concrete waiting to claim another driver who dared to be too bold.

“It’s still Darlington,” Harvick said. “(The track) can still reach out and grab you, but the consequences are a little bit bigger.”

Isn’t that how it should be?

Fastest is not always best. Darlington always has been and always will be a driver’s track. The egg-like shape challenges mechanics in their setups; what works at one end of the track creates difficulties at the other.

It’s 1950’s engineering in a battle against 2008 technology — and the old guy always wins.

Johnson, whose Darlington experiences includes two wins among eight top-10 finishes in nine starts, predicted in a pre-practice meeting with the media that passes in the race would be rare and side-by-side competition impossible.

“It’s pretty forgiving right now,” he said.

Little did he know.

In the first practice session, he took an aggressive approach and sent his Chevrolet into the first-turn wall. In the second, he spun before getting up to speed.

“It’s not Darlington,” Denny Hamlin claimed. “Darlington is a track where you know your times fall off about three seconds during the course of a (green-flag) run. The characteristics are somewhat the same, but it’s a whole new beast out there.

“(The repaved Darlington) is different, harder to drive. You used to, when your car got out of shape, to be able to correct it here. With the surface (tire grip) and hard times, if you get sideways, it’s going to be hard to recover. ... The margin of error is so small.”

Well, this is racing’s major league, isn’t it? The races should be a challenge, shouldn’t they?

David Pearson, the Darlington master called the Silver Fox, demonstrated years ago that fastest is not always best at his old track, but some drivers have not discovered the wisdom in his words.

The scraps and scratches from Friday’s practice should provide all the evidence required, but here’s betting they didn’t learn a thing. Watch tonight and see.