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NASCAR wants to race again in Southern California, but when will it happen?
NASCAR won’t visit Southern California next year and there’s no certainty when the stock-car racing series will return with construction on a new track in unincorporated San Bernardino County slowed.
NASCAR, which moved its 2025 season-opening event from the Coliseum to Winston-Salem, N.C., after three years, had hoped to race in Fontana next year, but the planned half-mile oval track being built on the site of the Auto Club Speedway won’t be completed in time — and there’s no timeline for when it will be done.
“What that looks like in the future remains to be seen,” Ben Kennedy, NASCAR’s executive vice-president and chief venue & racing information officer, said when the 2025 schedule was released this year. “Unfortunately we weren’t able to have it on the 2025 schedule, but bullish about getting it back on the schedule.”
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With the exception of 2021, when the schedule was hampered by the pandemic, NASCAR has run at least one race in Southern California every year since 1997, when the Fontana superspeedway opened on the site of the old Kaiser steel mill.
“It’s a massive market for us,” Kennedy added. “No. 2 in terms of the quantity of NASCAR fans, a huge media market for us. Strategically it makes a lot of sense for us to be in Southern California.”
The absence of the race also will take a bite out of the local economy. The UC Riverside Center for Economic Forecasting and Development, which was shuttered last year, estimated that the NASCAR race had an economic impact of $148.7 million in its last survey in 2017. Adjusted for inflation, that would be nearly $192 million today.
The two-mile, low-banked, D-shaped oval drew 85,000 fans for its first NASCAR event, but when the series added a second annual race at the track in 2004, attendance fell and in 2014, the grandstands were reconfigured to lower capacity to 68,000. NASCAR did not release attendance figures for its final race at the track last year but said it was sold out.
Ten days after that race, NASCAR sold 433 of the 522 acres of the track’s footprint to Ross Perot Jr.’s Dallas-based Hillwood Development company and CBRE Investment Management for approximately $569 million, reported to be a record price for an industrial land deal. The site will be converted into a logistics facility and industrial park with 6.6 million square feet of warehousing spacing, with NASCAR retaining ownership of approximately 90 acres for a planned half-mile short track.
Read more: Auto Club Speedway's two-mile oval takes a final lap into Inland Empire racing history
The main grandstands, front straight, pit road and pit road suites, which are all that remain of the old raceway, are to be incorporated into the new racing venue. But definitive plans on what the track will look like have not been released.
Construction began at the site last year with the build time on the track estimated at between 12 and 18 months. That timeline has proved overly optimistic.
“We have no updates on that effort at this time,” James Fuller, a spokesman for Hillwood and the Perot Group, said last month. In the meantime, traffic around the site on Cherry Avenue, sandwiched between the 10 and 210 freeways, has snarled.
NASCAR has been looking to transition part of its racing series from large superspeedways to half-mile oval tracks like the ones at Bristol, Tenn., Martinsville, Va., and North Wilkesboro, N.C. The resized Fontana facility is part of that transition.
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“Our goal is really to be in Southern California long term,” Kennedy said. “We’ve continued to work on our plans for Fontana. We have a number of different configurations and variations the team has been working on for what that track might look like [and] what are the other activities that could happen on that parcel of land that we have there.”
In the meantime, NASCAR is looking at other opportunities in Southern California, Kennedy said, with reports last spring saying the possibilities of a street race in San Diego were being explored.
The headwinds appear to be pushing the other way, however. It was recently announced that the Irwindale Speedway, home to a variety of lower-tier NASCAR racing series for a quarter-century, will host its final race on Dec. 21.
IDS Real Estate, which bought the site in 2022, plans to bulldoze the track and build an industrial park in its place.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
