At the ninth annual "Southern 500", a 1957 model Chevy race car was more valuable than its newer 1958 brother. There were real and valid reasons, of course, and none of them were lost among the mechanical wizards of the time. Fireball Roberts would win that year's classic in the #22 "Atlanta Tune-Up Service" '57 chevy. As best I can recall, the '57 Chevy is the only make and model to win Darlington in successive years, as the #46 '57 Chevy of "Speedy" Thompson had won in 1957.In 1958, it was possible for drivers racing in the "Southern 500" to wind up in the parking lot. The hard and crumpled-in-a-heap way. Three drivers took this route. Eddie Pagan, the pole, sitter blasted through the one-tiered-steel ribbon in turn one after blowing a tire on lap 137. Race officials could not repair the gaping hole in the gurad rail and continued the race, after warning drivers to be wary of the situation. Track photographer, Tom Kirkland, captured Pagan's crash......"by sheer reflex", the classic photos would be published in "Sports Illustrated" their first ever stock car photos.Twenty three laps later, Eddie Gray lost control of his "Vels" #8 '57 Ford and went out of the park through the hole in the wall from Pagan's crash. Luckily, Eddie Gray wasn't injured and his crash, perhaps, was not quite as spectacular, as Pagan's, but, nonetheless, Gray accomplished the Darlington parking lot excursion.Fifty laps later, veteran Jack Smith of Spartanburg, vaulted over the railing in turn one, tumbling down the embankment and, again, into the parking lot. The #47 '58 Pontiac was transformed into a smoking hulk. An uninjured Smith vowed to never race at Darlington again, a promise he kept.These outta-the-park crashes were but an exclamation point to action that began on lap seven, with the flaming crash of Don Kimberling. Only to be followed almost-outta-the-park spin of Jesse James Taylor (as a sensational 22 year old had finished 2nd in the 1951 Southern 500, only to be severely injured soon thereafter at Atlanta's Lakewood Speedway).But, as we now know, the Southern 500 would not be allowed to sustain itslef. Even with such incredible action, and tradition it (apparently) was not enough, It's all been moved, and re-named. Who could have guessed in 1958, that in less than fifty years, Darlington's Labor Day Classic, THE Southern 500 would be extinct.