Columnist Brian Hilderbrand: Why take Cup race out of Darlington?

Tuesday, March 18, 2003 | 10:09 a.m.

Brian Hilderbrand covers motor sports for the Las Vegas Sun. His motor sports notebook appears Friday. He can be reached at bh@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4089.

Timing is everything and Darlington picked the perfect time to stage two of the most exciting races in NASCAR history.

With NASCAR talking of moving Darlington's spring Winston Cup race next season as part of its schedule realignment plan, Ricky Craven and Kurt Busch waged a classic, last-lap, fender-banging duel to the finish in Sunday's Carolina Dodge Dealers 400.

When the smoke had cleared -- literally -- Craven had won the closest finish since NASCAR adopted its current timing and scoring system in 1993, by two-thousandths of a second.

If that wasn't enough to give the NASCAR brass second thoughts about taking away one of Darlington's two Winston Cup dates, the Busch Series on Monday put on an even more exciting finish in the rain-delayed DarlingtonRaceway.com 200.

Todd Bodine and Jamie McMurray got even more physical on the final lap than Craven and Busch had a day earlier. McMurray slipped past Bodine on the high side of the track, Bodine's car got loose and the two made contact and both cars were damaged and out of control as Bodine took the checkered flag just ahead of a spinning McMurray.

The weekend's races were not anomalies; the odd-shaped 1.366-mile oval consistently has produced more exciting racing over the years than the cookie-cutter D-shaped ovals (Las Vegas Motor Speedway included) that have cropped up on the circuit in the past decade -- tracks that likely would inherit races if NASCAR elects to move dates from Darlington and/or North Carolina Speedway.

Craven, while admitting to a natural bias, said it would be a tragedy if NASCAR moved one of Darlington's Winston Cup races.

"This is Fenway Park," Craven said of the track that has hosted Winston Cup racing since 1950. "This is a place ... maybe this is the Masters. From that standpoint, I would vote (taking a race away) down every single time. This is a great racetrack."

"There are a lot of rivalries out there (but) Ricky Craven and I for surely don't have one," Busch said. "We've raced one another and given each other three or four feet every time. This is something where we'll slap high-fives and drink a couple beers to later on."

Kroyer supplied the engines that carried Alan Pflueger to victory in the Protruck class in the Tecate SCORE San Felipe 250 desert race on Saturday and helped Brendan Gaughan to a third-place finish in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Darlington on Friday.

"When you're coming off of turn four on the last lap and you're racing for the lead, as long as you bring the steering wheel back home, everything's fair."