INDIANAPOLIS — It was an Indiana evening made for staying inside and doing nothing, but Dave Darland did not have that luxury. He stood in a cold trailer, prepping his helmet.
A factory worker can’t skip a shift because he finds frost on his windshield. In that spirit, here was Darland, a 57-year-old blue-collar racer, punching in for work.
Some 41 years after his sprint car career began at Kokomo Speedway, it was ending there, too. This was important. You saw that in the way other drivers drifted over to shake Darland’s hand. One was Shane Cottle, two days from his 52nd birthday, having a quick word with a man he’d battled forever.
The evening unfolded like a sentimental song. Darland leans toward country music, but his story is too rich for twangy guitars. The mood, a blend of joy and melancholy, called for a crooner, one with enough style to sing his way out of New Jersey saloons and into immortality.
When he was 17, it was a very good year.
That was in 1984, Darland’s second season in sprint cars. He’d done a long stretch running quarter midgets with his dad, Bob. Home was a speck of a town called Lincoln, eight miles outside Kokomo.
Bob got his hands on a used Lloyd Shores car, and Dave ran it once in the fall of ’82. He thought he was flying in hot laps until Terry Shepherd and Bimbo Atkins roared past him on either side, blasting his face shield with mud.
Kokomo was his prep school. In addition to Shepherd and Atkins, the regulars included Gary Fisher, Larry Martin, Denny England and Tony Ploughe, solid racers all. But the man to beat was Bob Kinser, who had a beer-keg torso, an anvil for a throttle foot and fists that he knew how to use.
It took until June of ’86 for young Dave to win a feature. He held off Bob Kinser to get it.
Life was coming together. At Warsaw Speedway farther north, Dave said hello to a cute blonde who’d been waving at him from the grandstands. Today, she’s Brenda Darland.
When he was 21, it was a very good year.
That was in 1988, when Darland won seven features at Warsaw and a pair at Kokomo. He was already a hot prospect; in ’87, he’d won the Wabash Clash at Lincoln Park in a borrowed car.
Now the good rides came. Darland steered Brent Earlywine’s sprinter to a 1993 victory in Terre Haute’s Hulman Classic, his first USAC score. In 1995, he landed a Silver Crown seat with Galen Fox and swept the Hulman Hundred and Hoosier Hundred at the Indiana State Fairgrounds.
Two years later, Darland was a Silver Crown champion. And in 1999, a split USAC sprint car schedule — dirt races with Gus Hoffman, pavement races with Bud Whitacre and Don Lambert — made him the king in a second national series.
When he was 35, it was a very good year.
That was in 2001, when Darland drove a Steve Lewis car to the first of two consecutive USAC midget titles. That made him just the third man, after Pancho Carter and Tony Stewart, to earn the sanctioning body’s Triple Crown.
In his tenure with Lewis, Darland won every outdoor midget race worth talking about: the Belleville Nationals, the Turkey Night Grand Prix, Eldora’s 4-Crown Nationals and the Hut Hundred at Terre Haute.
Four decades into his career, he could still hit the high notes. In 2013, at Perris Auto Speedway in California, Darland won the Oval Nationals in a Phillips Motorsports sprint car and another Turkey Night with Josh Ford’s midget. And from 2013-’15, he brought down the house at Kokomo with three straight wins in its marquee Smackdown event.
Alas, no trophy collection is tall enough to fence off real life.
In 2002, a heart attack claimed Bob Darland. In 2010, complications from diabetes took Dave’s mom, Joan. And early in 2021, Darland suffered a mild stroke triggered by a tiny blood clot. He insisted that he’d be back in action, and a year later he was. When he topped a local show at Kokomo this past July, the whole world applauded.
But you cannot outrun a calendar, and Darland understood that.
One day, talking about Louie Mann, an old-days hero at Kokomo and Warsaw, he said, “As a kid, I watched Louie beat a lot of great drivers. When his career was winding down and I was beating him, I realized that’s how racing is: You have your time, and then a new generation comes along.”
Darland decided he was ready to ring down the curtain, and the only place to do that was Kokomo, site of his first and last victories.
And now it was here. The sprint car feature was a blue-collar grind; he started sixth, finished seventh. But winner Robert Ballou sang his praises, saying, “Hats off to an unbelievable, badass career.”
At Darland’s trailer there were smiles, tears and memories.
His chief mechanic Mike Mann — Louie’s son and a winning driver himself — seemed in no hurry to load up. Tony Ploughe reminisced with Darland about quarter midgets in the ’70s and sprint cars in the ’80s. Indianapolis Motor Speedway president Doug Boles, dressed in layers, wore a Dave Darland T-shirt outside everything else.
The man of the hour stood in his uniform, the chilly air turning his breath to puffy clouds.
The weather was an apt metaphor: Like many of us, Darland is in the autumn of his own long year.
But, Lord, he had a wonderful summer.
Way back when, a songwriter named Ervin Drake put together a romantic number about this sort of thing. “It Was A Very Good Year” won Frank Sinatra a Grammy in 1966. That was a fine vintage for race drivers, too. On Sept. 4, Bob and Joan Darland had a son, David Lee.
The boy became a man, and the man became a legend.
This story appeared in the Nov 8, 2023, edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
