Cale Yarborough intertwined with Southern 500’s history

Cale Yarborough doesn’t agree with most of the decisions NASCAR has made through the years.

But one that has his full support was the decision to return the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway to Labor Day weekend. The track hosted a race during Labor Day weekend from 1950-2003 before NASCAR moved the date to California and later to Atlanta.

This year,the running of the Bojangles’ Southern 500 at Darlington is back on Labor Day weekend.

“I don’t know anything that could be much better for this part of the country than the Southern 500 coming back to Labor Day,” Yarborough said. “When they canceled it, I was under the impression they should have just canceled Labor Day if they aren’t running the Southern 500 at Darlington on Labor Day. It is great. It is supposed to be on Labor Day.”

NASCAR and Darlington Raceway are pulling out all the stops to mark the race’s return to its to annual Labor Day spot. The weekend will feature the return of the annual Southern 500 parade through Darlington on Saturday. The track’s theme for the weekend will focus on the early 1970s, when two of Yarborough’s five wins at the track occurred.

NBC, which will carry the race in primetime Sunday night, will have its on-air talent wearing 1970s clothing, and graphics and music also will feature that era. Hall of Famers Ken Squier, Ned Jarrett and Dale Jarrett will be calling some of the race in the booth.

“The best move NASCAR has made in a decade,” Squier said on a conference call this week. “Darlington is truly like no other, its imperfections. It’s the perfect competitive place for NASCAR.”

Thirty-two of the 43 Sprint Cup teams will be using some sort of throwback paint schemes with two of them honoring Yarborough. Denny Hamlin will run the No. 11 red-and-white paint scheme similar to Yarborough’s in the 1970s.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. will use a Valvoline paint scheme on his No. 88 car that Yarborough ran in the early 1980s, including his 1982 Southern 500 win. Earnhardt, Yarborough and former crew chief Ray Evernham were at Darlington last month to film a commercial for Valvoline, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary, that began airing this week.

“Ray wanted to know how I did it back then. Thinking about it, I wonder how we did it, too,” Yarborough said. “As hot as it was and 500 miles around that place, 100 percent concentration, I wonder how we did it, too. It would get so hot you could hardly breathe. A lot of the times our shoes would melt and stick to the floorboard. These boys don’t know how good they got it these days.”

Yarborough will be one of 14 NASCAR Hall of Famers in attendance this weekend. The 76-year-old holds Darlington in reverence when talking about it and the importance of his racing career.

Yarborough grew up a few miles away from the track in the small town of Sardis, just outside of Timmonsville. He tells the story of how he sneaked under the fence to get into a race at Darlington, and he made his stock car debut at the Lady in Black in 1957.

In 1965, he wasn’t sneaking under the fence but going over one after making contact with Sam McQuagg’s car in the Southern 500. Yarborough, known for his toughness and grit during his racing career, and his car ended up in the parking lot next to a telephone pole outside of the track. Tired of waiting for an ambulance, he proceeded to walk back up to the track.

“My car never touched the guard rail and it was destroyed,” Yarborough said. “I waited a little and didn’t know when the ambulance was going to come, so I just walked back up the hill and into the track.

“I have been under the fence, over the fence, on top of the fence and tried to knock every fence down there.”

Three years later, Yarborough won the first of his five Southern 500s. He said that win was the most special of his 83 victories for many reasons, one of which was it was the final race before they moved the track from 1.25 miles to the current 1.366 miles.

“If I went through my whole racing career and hadn’t won on the old Darlington, I would have felt like I missed something,” Yarborough said.

Yarborough made his last start at Darlington in 1987. He had an average finish of 16.2 in 49 career races there with 17 top-10 finishes.

“I am so proud of Darlington being in South Carolina. It is the first superspeedway and really got NASCAR’s attention that this is how we should go racing. It is the best thing to ever happen to NASCAR.”

This story was originally published September 3, 2015 at 5:44 PM with the headline "Cale Yarborough intertwined with Southern 500’s history."