It is a cruel quirk of NASCAR’s Winston Cup schedule that puts Darlington behind Bristol sort of like putting the toughest par 3 on a tough golf course in front of a double-dogleg par 4 that has water on the left, a thicket on the right and eight bunkers around the green.

Going from Bristol Motor Speedway, site of last weekend’s Sharpie 500, to Darlington Raceway, the site of the Southern 500, is like swapping the frying pan for the fire.

Dale Earnhardt's bump of Terry Labonte (5) in the 1999 Goody's 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway probably boosted ticket sales to that year's Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway the following week.

Toss in the fact that no one other than Jeff Gordon, last week’s winner, is going to Darlington in a good mood, and the situation is ripe for disaster.

“I think so,” Mike Beam, the crew chief on Ricky Craven’s No. 32 Ford, said at Bristol last Saturday. “You’ve got to go from here, where you have to give and take and show respect. You’ve got to give and take there, too it just doesn’t work out that way.”

Who’s going to Darlington, the track quite rightly nicknamed “Too Tough to Tame,” nursing a grudge?

Well, Elliott Sadler was pointing fingers figuratively and literally at Joe Nemechek after the two tangled in the early going at Bristol.

Rookie Jimmie Johnson won’t be sharing tea with Robby Gordon after Gordon collided with him on a re-start. Ward Burton was so angry with Dale Earnhardt Jr. for wrecking him that he waited for Junior to come around again and threw his heel protectors at Earnhardt’s window.

Oh, yeah. Does anybody remember who Jeff Gordon bumped out of the way with three laps to go to take the win? If you don’t, Rusty Wallace does.

So who is the only person happy about all of this? The guy selling tickets for the Darlington race.

Brett Bodine heads toward pit road after crashing into the wall during the March race at Darlington Raceway.

Jim Hunter, a vice president in NASCAR’s corporate offices, was president at Darlington in 1999 when the now-classic Dale Earnhardt-Terry Labonte confrontation took place at Bristol the week before the circuit headed to Darlington.

“Earnhardt told me that week that he should get a cut of the ticket sales,” Hunter said, laughing. “Our ticket sales the last week went way up, and I’m sure Earnhardt and Labonte’s wreck had something to do with that.”

In truth, Darlington is probably the safest track to follow on the heels of Bristol. Like any good golfer, the good drivers are able to put a bad hole behind them and concentrate on the one at hand, especially when the one coming up is the No. 1 handicapped hole on the course.

Because of its unique egg shape turns 3 and 4 are much tighter than turns 1 and 2 and its unusually abrasive surface, Darlington is the most challenging track on the circuit.

Drivers have wrecked at Darlington, for instance, under the leisurely pace of a caution period.

The “Darlington Stripe,” caused by a car scraping the outside wall, is seen as a badge of courage.

“I never looked at (the Darlington race following the Bristol race) as a big issue,” said Kyle Petty, who drives the No. 45 Dodge. “I looked at it as 20 races in 20 weeks, and those were just two in there. But to try to get ready for those two tracks back to back can be tough sometimes.”

Petty says that Darlington is probably the ideal place to go after Bristol.

“Darlington’s a good equalizer,” he said. “You can’t get mad at anything at Darlington but the racetrack.

“We all joke about how the tires wear out leaving pit road that’s just how abrasive the track is. The thing is, you don’t have time to race people at Darlington. You end up spending all your time racing the racetrack.”

Moreover, Petty added, drivers spend all their time just trying to get their car good enough to race the racetrack. And that is often more work than can be accomplished in one weekend.

“We can talk about the Kurt Busch-Jimmy Spencer incidents (which started at Bristol this spring) all we want to, but as soon as they get to Darlington, all they’re concentrating on is getting their cars to work on the racetrack. They’re screaming more about that than at each other,” Petty said.

“I’ve never seen anybody be able to make their car do what it needed to do good enough at Darlington to run into each other. They can make it do what they want it to do to run into the wall, but not each other. That’s a different issue.”