Remembering Cale Yarborough This Darlington Weekend

Every time I exit Interstate 20 and hit the back roads to Darlington Raceway, Cale Yarborough comes to mind.

The passing farm fields of the South Carolina Lowcountry, now pale after the harvest, are where Yarborough grew up, his toughness built through the trials of being a country boy who never knew what the next sunrise might bring.

He lived near Timmonsville, not far from Darlington Raceway, and was naturally attracted to the speedway and the wild men who challenged one of the roughest tracks around. As a kid, his pockets empty, he crawled under the fence to watch.

Fast forward across the years, and Yarborough would overcome every challenge, racing on area dirt tracks on a penny and a prayer, eventually making it to NASCAR and Darlington and something he could only have dreamed of as a farm kid.

He would become one of the toughest of the tough, winning the Southern 500 five times and scoring three Cup Series championships on the way to an almost automatic berth in the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

The latest generation of stock car racers has gathered once again at Darlington this weekend for another version of NASCAR’s oldest superspeedway race. There will be close competition, cars will slam into the old walls that contain race cars that go far faster than they should on such a tight speedway and a survivor will go home with the big trophy as his name joins the Yarboroughs and Pettys and Pearsons and Earnhardts.

The thing that will be missing this year is Cale Yarborough. His remarkable life came to an end last year on New Year’s Eve, perhaps symbolically an appropriate day for the last lap of a grand champion. He was 84 and had battled numerous health issues for several years.

Cale outlasted two of the men who were major influences in the heart of his career: Mountain man Junior Johnson, the team owner who raced like Cale before there was a Cale, and old school crew chief Herb Nab, who left the track each day with the grime and oil of a hard day’s work on his uniform and body. Nab died in 1988, Johnson in 2019.

Yarborough retired from driving in 1988 and was around a few more years as a car owner. When he finally left the sport, he was mostly done with it. He rarely showed up at races or NASCAR-related events, but his presence at Darlington remains embedded in the track’s long history and in the fast lanes that led to victory.

It is no small thing that, despite the records here of Darlington masters like David Pearson and Dale Earnhardt, the track’s garage carries the name of Cale Yarborough.

Yarborough talked often of his first victory in the Southern 500, that coming on September 2, 1968, back when the race was run in the heat of the day on Labor Day. The track was a bit flatter and harder to drive in those days, and Cale always considered that first win, the difficulties of which clearly showed on his grime-covered, sweat-soaked face after the race, one of his grandest accomplishments.

On Sunday, Dale Jarrett, like Yarborough a Hall of Famer, will drive one of Yarborough’s former race cars, a 1978 Oldsmobile, around the track for a few ceremonial laps.

The car will lead the field, as Cale did for 1,647 laps here.

On a day when one of the South’s race classics gets the green flag one more time, we miss him.