I took a trip down memory lane recently with Darlington Dragway owner Jeff Miles when I visited his legendary quarter-mile facility that I first encountered more than three decades ago. Jeff and I are close to the same age, so many of our early memories are roughly from the same time period, which was truly a magical time in the history of IHRA.
[Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in DI #189, the Women of Power Issue, in July/August of 2024.]
I was at least 16 years old when I first laid eyes on the place, because I drove my 1984 Pontiac Grand Prix (complete with glass t-tops) to Darlington for a national event. I remember the trip well, because my car ran hot and cracked a head on the way home, no thanks to the temperature warning light, which was undoubtedly taking the evening off.
Meanwhile, Jeff got to experience Darlington sooner than I did, since his dad took him when he was still in middle school. The finals were rained out on Sunday, so the Miles family returned on Monday for the exciting conclusion, and Jeff’s dad let the kids skip school, which only added to the excitement! “I remember it well, including where we ate breakfast that morning in Orangeburg…the place is still there and I think about it every time I pass by it,” Jeff says.
As for the race, Jeff says they were all pulling for Del Worsham to win Funny Car, but instead, he went across the finish line on fire and lost. The sights and sounds of that weekend are forever etched in his memory, and we exchanged one story after another as we recalled our early experiences from Darlington. Close to 40 years later, Jeff would end up buying the track!
When I returned home from my most recent visit, I hastily disappeared up to the attic to shuffle through my archives from the early 1990s. I found a treasure trove of photos, many of them I shot with black and white print film from my days of working for my local newspaper. When I say the early 1990s was a magical time, you’d just about had to have lived through them to understand the impact. For starters, IHRA launched Pro Modified in 1990, and the first national event of the explosive new class happened at the Winter Nationals, held, of course, at Darlington.
As I sifted through boxes of pictures, I found one of Ronnie Sox, with parachutes in full blossom as he crossed the finish line. Sox was a Pro Stock legend, but the newly-launched Pro Modified class was so mystifying it lured him out of retirement, and he commissioned chassis builder Tommy Mauney to build the Comet for his grand return. I was fortunate enough to be in the early stages of my drag racing media career just as Sox was returning for his second chapter.
To add to the excitement of this era, sportsman racers from my local tracks were winning national events and even world championships while touring with IHRA. That’s Frank Teague (who to this day lives a few miles from me) launching his Dodge Daytona in spectacular fashion, and featured on the front page of the Lenoir News-Topic’s Sports section, dated September 18, 1992. The file photo was one I shot earlier that year at Darlington, and it was used to illustrate Teague’s national event victory in Epping, New Hampshire, with hopes of also doing well when the tour returned to Darlington for the U.S. Open Nationals. Get a load of the sink-clogging mop of hair I had in those days!
Fast-forward to my most recent visit to Darlington, Jeff said he had something for me, and I nearly fainted when he handed me an unopened pack of IHRA trading cards from 1990. Oh sure, I felt like a moron tearing open the plastic of a sealed time capsule from 34 years ago, but seeing those cards was a need I can’t explain, and besides, Jeff told me he had plenty more, which is pretty amazing in itself.
I picked out my four favorite cards from that pack to include in this column. Ed Hoover’s Super Shops Camaro not only won the first IHRA Pro Modified national event in history, but Ed also brought the car to my local Hudson Drag Strip for a match race back in the day. And how about a blast from the past with Tommy Mauney’s trading card…the one year he drove the Williford Racing Trans Am in Pro Stock and won the world championship! Wayne Bailey’s card kinda hit me hard, remembering how we tragically lost him in a Top Fuel crash at Red River Raceway near Shreveport, Louisiana.
Shuffling through the stack a little further, I came across Harold Denton’s card, and couldn’t help but smile. He lived a long, full life and accomplished great things in drag racing. He was also a huge supporter of Drag Illustrated, and told me how much he loved the magazine practically every time I saw him, right up until a few months before he died this past March at age 85. Looking at his card, I was transported back in time to 9-21-91, when I was standing on the starting line at – you guessed it, Darlington – when Denton drove Jim Ruth’s “Party Time” Pro Stock Trans Am to the first sub-7-second blast in IHRA Pro Stock history when he clocked 6.98…and the place went nuts!
Jeff emailed me an IHRA media guide that published every record, national event winner, and notable piece of history you can think of, and it would take several columns just to scratch the surface of the role Darlington played in that biography. For certain, that era of drag racing has come and gone, but if you were around to see it unfold in real time, I believe you’ve got some of the best memories drag racing has to offer.
This story was originally published on July 25, 2024. 
