Darlington 500 Race Preview

Written by Gabriel Tsui, Edited by Tarun Suresh

Image Credits: Darlington Raceway via X

After 25 weeks of racing, we reach the regular season finale for the 2024 NASCAR season. We head back up to South Carolina to Darlington Raceway, to determine who will fill the final three playoff spots. Following a surprise win in Daytona by Harrison Burton, will there be another surprise winner in Darlington?

Track Preview

The Darlington Raceway is located in Darlington, South Carolina. The Darlington 500 is one of the oldest races on the NASCAR calendar, hosted ever since 1950.

The race used to be held late in the year up until 2004 and had a short period of time where it was held in mid-May before it made a return to early September in 2015. This was also the first playoff race in every season since 2020 but was shuffled to the regular season as Watkins Glen makes its debut in the playoffs.

The track has a distance of 1.37 miles (2.20 kilometres), with 25 degrees of banking in the first turn and 23 degrees of banking in the second turn. The drivers will be driving 115 laps in stages one and two, 137 laps to close out the final stage, totalling 367 laps and 501.32 miles around the track.

The weather report shows that there will be no rain during the weekend, with mild temperatures during race day. The race will commence on Sunday, September 1st, at 18:00 ET (15:00 PT, 00:00 CET).

Race Prediction

As this is the final race of the regular season, drivers outside of the bubble such as Kyle Busch, Chase Briscoe, or Todd Gilliland will be looking to make the playoffs via a win.

The likes of Bubba Wallace and Ross Chastain are still in striking range, but a decent performance by Ty Gibbs and Chris Buescher will leave Wallace and Chastain from the outside looking in, so they will be looking for a win to avoid settling this on points.

Ever since the switch to gen-6 cars, Chevrolet has had a firm grip on this track, winning three of the five races. So the prediction will be that one of the Chevrolet drivers brings their car all the way to victory lane, closing out the regular season with a win.