Click here to follow us on Twitter @circletrackplus   Click here to like us on Facebook 

Different NASCAR tracks evoke different sounds in my mind.

Fontana. Kansas. Chicago, uh, land. Talladega! Daytona! Bristol! Martinsville!

DARRRRRLLLLINNNGGGTTTONNNN!

This feeling isn’t objective. Emotions never are. Darlington Raceway is where my daddy took me when I was a young’un. My favorite day of the year was that of the Rebel 400 in the spring.

My least favorite was Labor Day, a Monday that was then when the Southern 500 was run, and it being Labor Day, my football coach deemed it appropriate to labor that day in preparation for a Friday-night football game.

Football pretty much wiped out the first half of the 1970s for me in the all-important Southern 500 category.

Darlington. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

1. The racing groove is a sidewalk compared to other tracks.

2. That press-box refrain when too many cars head into the third turn side-by-side. Uh, oh! Uh, oh! Ain’t gonna make it …

3. Tackle football in the infield mud while it’s raining. (Not me, mind you.) This generally takes place outside the track at Talladega.

4. All the genteel race-track helpers who have been around long enough to remember a time when it was deemed advisable to get along with the media.

5. Eating cheeseburgers at the Raceway Grill with someone like Donnie Allison or Dale Inman nearby.

It’s been a while now since I’ve been to Darlington. I hope most of the above is still in place.

Darlington. What do I miss? Let me count those ways:

1. Thousands of scouts – Boy, Cub, Webelos – sitting on the back straight. Which is now the front straight.

2. The dulcet, sometimes hilarious, tones of public-address announcer Ray Melton.

3. The day the late Jim Hunter, a huckster of the first order and I write that affectionately, declaring the halfway point of the Busch race to have been the middle of the back straight. Naturally, he got away with it.

4. Covering the Southern 500 for the first time, in 1981, and thinking to myself as I clicked a camera on pit road, and got plunked in the shin by a flying lugnut, that anyone could drive around the track but it took a righteous man to get in and out of the pits. These were the pre-speed-limit days.

5. The sweltering Saturday when Larry Pearson, son of the Darlington master, won the Busch race. As I get older, the simple pleasures loom larger, I reckon.

Once upon a time, I may have wavered in which pro football team was my favorite. I may have cast a vote I later regretted. I may still rue the day I let a woman slip away. Never, in my life, has there been the slightest doubt that Darlington is the greatest track where stock cars ever raced.

As such, my expectations for Sunday night are high, but Darlington can’t run a race that I won’t like.