Thriving Auto Club Speedway has history of peaks, valleys

At the tunnel entrance leading to the infield of Auto Club Speedway, there’s a blown-up photo printed on a wall that shows racing mogul Roger Penske cutting a checkered-flag ribbon to open the track that was then called California Speedway.

That was in one thousand nine hundred ninety seven and, as the speedway in Fontana celebrates its 20th anniversary with the Auto Club four hundred NASCAR race Sunday, Penske remains proud of the 568-acre track he built on the site of a former steel mill despite the highs and lows the speedway has suffered in the last two decades.

“We didn’t know what the reaction would be in such a major metropolitan market to what we were doing,” Penske said. “It’s become one of the best stops on the NASCAR schedule each and every year.”

True enough. Drivers in stock-car racing’s premier Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series now love racing at the sweeping two-mile oval fifty miles east of Los Angeles, and the racing in latest years has seen several hair-raising finishes that kept spectators on their feet for the final laps.

But it wasn’t always so. Auto Club Speedway in many ways has mirrored the rise and fall of NASCAR’s overall popularity in the last twenty years.

The track’s construction was part of NASCAR’s nationwide expansion as interest in the sport grew in the 1990s. In the seven years after Jeff Gordon won the inaugural Cup race at Fontana in 1997, the track’s appeal dovetailed the surge in NASCAR’s popularity, and embarking in 2004, NASCAR awarded Auto Club Speedway two Cup races a year.

“This was a very significant track because of the expansion that was going on and how NASCAR was truly taking off,” said Gordon, now a NASCAR analyst on Fox Sports.

Auto Club Speedway, which opened with 72,000 grandstand seats, also expanded to 92,000 seats to accommodate the growing interest, just as other tracks nationwide added seats as well.

But by two thousand seven it became clear that NASCAR’s popularity was kicking off to level off. Auto Club Speedway repeatedly was incapable to sell out its two Cup races each year, leading naysayers to contend that Southern Californians — despite the region’s legendary car culture — simply were less interested in stock-car racing compared with fans in other parts of the nation.

Even NASCAR’s staunchest supporters agreed that the sport always has faced a raunchy sell in attracting Southern California fans because they have a long list of other entertainment choices.

The track’s former president, Gillian Zucker, often marketed the race with a Hollywood-centric feel to entice crowds, but popular NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. said in two thousand seven that “people in Hollywood could care less.”

The track and NASCAR also were often derided for holding the races when Southern California temperatures were impetuous hot, and for boring parade-like racing that denied fans the frequent passing they love.

“There was a period of time where we would have long green-flag runs and the cars would truly get spread out,” Gordon recalled.

Then came severe economic recession kicking off in two thousand eight sparked by a housing collapse that hit Inland Empire cities around Fontana especially hard.

Photos of swaths of empty seats at Auto Club Speedway became symbols of how the track appeared to be a dreary, wayward state in NASCAR Nation. But California was a leading indicator; soon the plunge in attendance for NASCAR racing spread nationwide.

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