No matter what you change, Darlington is who she is

There was more horsepower and less downforce. The tires were soft.

But on a beautiful day in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, Darlington Raceway still looked like Darlington Raceway.

It’s not a bad thing. The racing was still good, maybe even slightly better than some previous events. Drivers had fun. The cars were hard to drive, as they should be. And the package allowed drivers to get a run, take it and make a pass.

On the other hand, Sunday’s race might have failed the eye test for some. After being hyped up all week with talk of out-of-control race cars and big tire fall-off, the Goodyear 400 perhaps didn’t visually look any different from other Darlington races. Some might have felt let down, as if nothing had changed.

There was plenty going on, however, if you knew what to look for or were watching the stopwatch. There was tire fall-off, and fresher tires were still the winning way. The cars were sliding around. Brad Keselowski said drivers couldn’t be a foot offline.

“It was a lot of fun,” he said. “The cars were a bear to drive.”

With the previous package, would Tyler Reddick have been able to rebound from multiple issues and win? Or would Ryan Blaney be able to come through the field multiple times for a top-five finish? 

“I don’t know. It’s hard to tell,” Blaney said. “I feel like it definitely got more spread out with this package and once guys hit the cliff, they were BASE jumping off the cliff. It went downhill fast for a lot of guys. This is the first time, I think, in my Cup career, that I let a guy go a few laps into a restart if he’s hounding me or come off pit road under green flag stops, and I said to myself, ‘I’ll see you in about 20', and that happened.

The Darlington package found a fan in Ryan Blaney, who hopes to see it used elsewhere. Johnathan Bachman/Getty Images

“I don’t know if that would have happened in the other package. I think it was a success. I think it was good; definitely not worse. So, it was a successful day of running that package here. I’m excited to run it more places.”

Darlington has always been a tough old racetrack. It’s usually a blue-collar type of workday for the field. No matter the package, no matter the drivers, Darlington is what it is, and it has looked the same for a long while.

Again, there is nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean the package NASCAR used Sunday didn’t work, or that it won’t work even better at some other racetracks. For Darlington, though, it might have shown that the expectations for the place called ‘Too Tough To Tame’ always wind up being ‘Too High To Meet’ and we should know better.

“I thought the cars were a handful for the guys, which I don’t know if that put on a good show,” Brian Wilson, the crew chief for Austin Cindric, said. “It seemed like it could have been. It had some comers and goers. But all in all, it felt a lot like just Darlington. I know talking to Austin, it was definitely a handful to where it was kind of lane-limited and anytime you have that, it’s going to be hard to pass. 

“Now, we saw some of the best cars that were able to even pit and make some ground. But I think we probably would have seen that with the previous package. So I think to really get a gauge on this, you’re going to have to see where it goes after a few races and guys get to work on it. A lot of the separation throughout the field is going to get closer. That, and I think if it were a cooler day, maybe you got more lanes to work and then it gets a bit more racy.”

Having the data point on the high-horsepower, low-downforce package for bigger racetracks will be the most important thing that comes out of Sunday. There will be plenty to dissect going forward, and who knows what tweaks will be made. With plenty of racing still to be done with it this year, the teams have plenty of time to figure out what does and doesn’t work, and how NASCAR can take that going forward.

Was Darlington a good race? It was by Darlington standards, and what pure racing should be about. But did we once again expect too much, or that it would be radically different after a week of hype? Absolutely.

Darlington is who she is and maybe like any woman, we shouldn’t try to change her. Or at least, we should not expect a different result when trying to change her.