2011 Showtime Southern 500 at Darlington

Race Details

The Showtime Southern 500 is the annual spring NASCAR Sprint Cup race held at Darlington Raceway in Darlington, South Carolina. It began in 1957 known as the Rebel 300, then it expanded to 400 and then 500 miles but then returned to 400 in 1994.

Without a title sponsor for 2009, the race tentatively adopted the moniker of Southern 500, the traditional name of the fall race run from 1950-2004 on Labor Day weekend. A one-year deal with Go Daddy was signed. Some fans referred to the race exclusively as the GoDaddy.com 500 out of respect to what fans called the "real" Southern 500, a fall-race showdown. In 2010, Showtime signed a multi-year deal to sponsor the race, giving it the name Showtime Southern 500.

Darlington Raceway was created at first in the mind of Harold Brasington back in 1949. Despite of his friends laughing at him and considering his idea even ridiculous, he set out in the fall of 1949 to shape a 1.25-mile speedway on land that had once produced peanuts and cotton.

Brasington often operated the controls of bulldozers and grading equipment. The original plan was to give the racetrack a true oval shape, but the racetrack's design had to be changed to satisfy the landowner, who did not want his nearby minnow pond disturbed. The west end of the track (Turns 3 and 4) was narrowed to accommodate the fishing facility, creating Darlington's distinctive egg-shaped design.

Finally, the first race was scheduled for Labor Day 1950, and Brasington expected no more than 10,000 fans, but a crowd showed up in an amount nearly 3 times bigger to see Californian Johnny Mantz drove to victory that day. The race was known as the Rebel 500 from 1950/2004.

Today the Darlington Raceway is known as the track "Too Tough to Tame" and "The Lady in Black", and it is still remembered as the original superspeedway and as one of the pillars of the NASCAR establishment.

2011 Showtime Southern 500 Results

2010 Showtime Southern Results

Past Winners

Sign up with Sportbet.com and recieve NASCAR Racing Lines and Odds on everything from the Auto Racing world.

Each week there will be a fairly comprehensive listing of NASCAR betting lines offered by Sportbet.com on the different NASCAR Races.