Fixing Fontana?

February 28, 2008

By Patty Kay   

I bid you good day, gentle readers. Please understand that this is only a “Guest” article and not an offering from a regular columnist at IRN. The reasons for that are myriad, but on this occasion, I felt the need to offer an opinion.

As I type, this is coming from nowhere but my TV, courtesy of “NASCAR Now” on ESPN2. Gillian Zucker, she of “They’re all downstairs, shopping” fame, has come up with a way to fix the track that most agree shouldn’t exist, Auto Club Speedway, formerly knows as California Speedway. C’mon, you all sat through this weekend and saw the folly that is Fontana!

Allow me to take you back for a moment. In the opening laps of the “race”, we saw two vicious accidents involving several of the race favorites. (Insert your own Fantasy team here). Those were followed by over an hour of red-flag conditions before the track was deemed “ready to race” one more time. Bear in mind that according to many of the drivers, it was never ready to begin with.

Despite that, they went back to racing…briefly. After a couple more yellow flags, the red finally flew a second time…for rain…what a surprise! We then had a race that anyone with a functioning brain knew wasn’t going to be run that night. Still, NASCAR persisted in “attempting” to dry the track…and this after having cut perpendicular grooves in the dang thing to relieve water pressure from beneath its surface during the first red flag.

There comes a point at which one wisely says, “Enough.” Most race fans that I know, including this one, reached that point long before NASCAR did. We were long in bed and asleep before the 2:00 AM EST proclamation that the race would finish on Monday.

Congratulations to Carl Edwards on winning the race on an impossible track and to Jimmie Johnson for a great run to keep the end of the race interesting. Their race to the finish was the best part of three long, wet days.

In the world according to Gillian, the track that stole the final Rockingham date from the Rock and the Southern 500 from Darlington would be best served to become…a restrictor plate track! Oh God, spare me from further shame!

Yep, that’s exactly what NASCAR needs right now…a track that has proven its inability to draw a crowd, offering the worst excuse for racing in existence. Please, follow my logic here. Fontana couldn’t fill one race...so NASCAR, in its “wisdom”, gave it two. Neither race can fill a rather small (75,000) grandstand. This past weekend, we saw that the track couldn’t even withstand a little rain and dry as a normal track would.

All right then…let’s not cut a race from this useless track and give it back to either of the more deserving and proven tracks. Instead, let’s just rip it up and bank it high enough to require restrictor plates. Yeah, that’ll drag California folks away from a night at the Oscars…NOT!

Folks, in this writer’s humble opinion, to which I am constitutionally entitled, that Michigan clone, which refuses to race like Michigan despite the Captain’s best efforts, has no reason to exist on the NASCAR circuit, other than the fact that it lies within the range of a huge population. NASCAR sees numbers and automatically sees dollar signs. I’d submit that sometimes that formula doesn’t work. Every trick in the book has been used to no avail in attempts to fill the small stadium that is Fontana. Face it; a lot of folks out there aren’t NASCAR fans and aren’t about to switch.

With no offense to fans on the left coast, there just aren’t enough of you to matter. Both NASCAR and real fans of racing would be better served if we moved on to a track where racing and its fans are welcome. The last thing in the world this series needs is yet another race…God forbid, two…at a restrictor plate track.

Gillian, would you consider being reasonable and cutting Fontana back to a short track, say in the image of a Richmond or a Bristol? No, I didn’t think so. Would you then consider putting twists and turns into Fontana to make it a road course? No, I didn’t think so. Would you even consider the much more reasonable approach of doing what Bruton Smith did with a “boring” track at Las Vegas…turning the entire thing under and starting from scratch to make it a real track with gradient banking? Again, I didn’t think so.

Ah, but then, in my wildest dreams (nightmares), I never thought you’d propose to make it a track that required restrictor plates in order for cars to run on it. That, my dear Gillian, is beyond preposterous!

I have one last question. What would it take to convince you to blow the whole dang track to Kingdom Come and turn it into a field where someone could grow “Medical marijuana?” It seems to me that would solve a problem for both the fans of real racing and many residents of southern California quite nicely.

Be well gentle readers, and remember to keep smiling. It looks so good on you!

You can contact Patty Kay at.. Insider Racing News

The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.

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