NASCAR remains committed to bringing stock car racing back to Southern California. But it admitted this weekend it is still not sure where and when that will happen.
“The market is extremely important to NASCAR,” said Dave Allen, NASCAR’s West Region president. “So we’re not abandoning the market. What we don’t have is a firm timeline yet. There’s some things within the sport that need to get sorted before we can make some strategic decisions as it relates to what we’re what we’re going to build.
“We’re going to do something. I just don’t know what and when yet.”
Allen spoke before Sunday’s Shriners Children’s 500 at Phoenix Raceway, where Christopher Bell notched his third consecutive NASCAR Cup Series win by holding off a hard-charging Denny Hamlin on the final restart with two laps to go.
With the exception of 2021, when the schedule was hampered by the coronavirus pandemic, NASCAR has run at least one race in Southern California every year since 1997, when Auto Club Speedway opened on the site of the old Kaiser steel mill in Fontana. That streak will end this year.
Read more: NASCAR wants to race again in Southern California, but when will it happen?
Auto Club Speedway, which has been torn down, played host to its final race in 2023 while the Clash at the Coliseum, run on a temporary half-mile track installed atop the Coliseum’s football field, did not return this winter after three years. NASCAR had hoped to race on a half-mile oval being built on the site of the former Fontana speedway, but that project has stalled.
“That’s option No. 1,” said Allen, the former president of Auto Club Speedway. “Obviously, we’ve been there for a long time. We still retain enough land to build a half-mile oval if we chose to do that.
“But we still need some time to sort some things out and figure out if that’s the right thing to do.”
In the meantime, NASCAR is embracing concepts outside traditional race tracks. The series debuted a street race in Chicago in 2023 and has reportedly considered racing on the streets of San Diego as well.
“We’re always looking for new opportunities,” Allen said. “We’re always looking for either new markets or things that we can do different in a market that we’re already [in].
“We’re trying to leave all options open.”
Ten days after the final race in Fontana, NASCAR reportedly sold 433 of the 522 acres that comprise the venue’s footprint to Ross Perot Jr.’s Dallas-based Hillwood Development company and CBRE Investment Management for approximately $569 million. The site is being converted into a logistics facility and industrial park with 6.6 million square feet of warehousing spacing.
A generation ago there were more than a dozen race tracks holding regular events across Southern California, but with the closing of Irwindale Raceway last year, just a handful remain. Many, such as Irwindale and the Auto Club Speedway, sat on land that had become too valuable, part of a nationwide trend that has seen the ground sold out from beneath iconic short tracks in places such as Greenville, S.C., and Midland, N.C., the heart of stock-car country.
“The land and the cost of doing business, when you have a facility like we had in Fontana, it’s very, very challenging,” Allen said. “At the end of the day we’re a for-profit company and we have to make decisions that are good for the business so we can keep it going.”
Read more: Irwindale Speedway closure the latest blow to racing in Southern California
The ideal solution, Allen said, is the original one. NASCAR retained approximately 90 acres of Auto Club Speedway’s massive footprint, including the main grandstands, front straight, pit road and pit road suites. Those were all to be incorporated into the new short-track venue.
“The plan is to be there. But if opportunities come up, we’re open to anything,” Allen said. “If you had 300 acres and wanted to build a racetrack and be a partner with us, then we would listen. So I think it’s keeping the property warm and being able to do different things with it. And you adjust depending on the market and needs of the market.
“We’re kind of just in a holding pattern.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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