FONTANA — The mood was melancholy here Sunday, largely because so much of Auto Club Speedway’s future was unknown and therefore uncertain.
But by the end of the afternoon, after Kyle Busch won the final NASCAR Cup Series race on the two-mile oval that played host to its first race in 1997, track president Dave Allen had reassurance for those race fans worried that Southern California, and particularly the Inland Empire, might be about to totally lose another track. There will be an announcement in the coming months, and there will be a brand-new racing facility on this land in years to come.
“I’m hopeful that we get to a point here in the near future, some time this year, (that) there’s going to be a few different bites at the apple as it relates to more information coming out and a timeline established,” Allen said.
“And honestly, I can’t wait to share some of the things that we’ve been working on from a design perspective, because we’ve been working on it for quite a while.”
It will be a short track, a half-mile oval, and the hints are that this will be what Allen called “the most state-of-the-art short track that’s ever been built,” a facility that not only will transform NASCAR racing in Southern California but could serve as a venue for regular local racing programs as well.
The references to the last race, which will be followed by at least one year off the Cup series schedule and maybe two, may have thrown all of us off. The competitors and the broadcasters treated it as the end of an era, as they should have, but the general public seemed uncertain whether “last race” referred to the last on the two-mile oval or the last race ever.
Those fears weren’t soothed by a Friday report by Sports Business Journal, citing sources and public documents, that NASCAR, which owns the speedway, has closed on a deal to sell 433 of the property’s 522 acres to an entity called Speedway SBC Development LLC, with the sale price estimated…
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