I just learned something else I didn't know, that the 1963 Darlington Rebel 300 was actually two separate 150-mile races with an intermission and the winner determined by combined points.
Here's an account:
TWO LITTLE REBELS
Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines
July, 2011 - Jim Donnelly
The chop tops, representing NASCAR's experiment with running "convertible" stock cars as something of a B-list show to the Grand Nationals, were gone, chopped from the schedule themselves in 1963. That left Darlington Raceway without the traditional division for its second race, the springtime Rebel 300. Thankfully for Darlington, it had a very smart president at the time, with an unusual background for a racing promoter.
His name was Bob Colvin, and he started out as track founder Harold Brasington's vice president when Darlington was built in 1950. The Pee Dee River plain that surrounds Darlington was farmland, and Colvin had been raised in a family of peanut farmers before going away to Clemson University to study agriculture. He then became a peanut broker near Darlington. Being a grower in a state with withering summer heat, Colvin was well versed in risk.
When NASCAR canned the convertibles, leaving him to let typical hardtops contest the 1963 Rebel 300, Colvin put his own brassy fillip on the race: He chopped the erstwhile chop-top go in half. It was split into twin 150-mile segments on Darlington's asymmetrical 1.366-mile oval, bracketing a timed intermission. Colvin's setup assigned points based on the drivers' finishing position in each half, with the halves totaled to determine an overall winner.
The great Joe Weatherly, on his way to a NASCAR title and then sudden death, won it in Bud Moore's Pontiac by beating Junior Johnson in the first act and then running second to Richard Petty in the second. Tom Kirkland, who photographed action at his home speedway from its very beginning in 1950, narrates the story.
The twin-Rebel format was never tried again, perhaps because in 1963, Colvin only had a few years to live. NASCAR, however, has toyed with segmenting its all-star races at various points for years, and in the world of short tracks, programs that involve multiple features in one night (such as twin 20-lapper or triple 20s) are usually wildly popular with fans.
"That mandatory 30-minute break between the races, during which they made repairs and then lined them up to race again, well, I've thought about it and (the format) since then, but then it takes someone like you to bring it up," Tom told us. "I have no idea why they never did it again after 1963. Bob was not an orator. He was very poor at public speaking. But there was a wheel in his head for innovation, and it was always turning."
This article originally appeared in the July, 2011 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.
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"Any Day is Good for Stock Car Racing"
updated by @dave-fulton: 12/05/16 04:00:58PM
