NASCAR will not visit Southern California next year and there is no certainty when the stock car racing series will return with construction of a new track in the unincorporated county slowing from San Bernardino.
NASCAR, which moved its 2025 season-opening event from Coliseum in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, after three years, he had hoped to race at Fontana next year, but the planned half-mile oval track under construction at the Auto Club Speedway site will not be completed on time – and there is no timetable. for when this will be done.
“It remains to be seen what this will look like in the future,” Ben Kennedy, NASCAR executive vice president and chief venue and racing information officer, said when the 2025 schedule was released this year. “Unfortunately, we were unable to put it on the 2025 calendar, but we are optimistic that it will return to the calendar.”
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With the exception of 2021, where the schedule was disrupted by the pandemic, NASCAR has run at least one race in Southern California. every year since 1997when the Fontana Highway opened on the site of the former Kaiser steelworks.
“It’s a huge market for us,” Kennedy added. “No. 2 in terms of the number of NASCAR fans, a huge media market for us. Strategically, it makes perfect sense for us to have a presence in Southern California.”
The lack of racing will also have a negative impact on the local economy. The Center for Forecasting and Economic Development at UC Riverside, which closed last year, estimated that NASCAR racing had an economic impact of $148.7 million in its last survey in 2017. Adjusted at inflation, that would represent nearly $192 million today.
The two-mile, low-banking, D-shaped oval attracted 85,000 fans for its first NASCAR event, but when the series added a second annual race at the track in 2004, attendance plummeted and by 2014, the stands were reconfigured to reduce their capacity. at 68,000. NASCAR did not release attendance figures for its last race at the track last year, but said it was a sellout.
Ten days after that race, NASCAR sold 433 of the track’s 522 acres to Ross Perot Jr.’s Dallas-based Hillwood Development and CBRE Investment Management for about $569 million, which would be a record price for an industrial land agreement. . The site will be converted into a logistics facility and industrial park with 6.6 million square feet of warehousing space, with NASCAR retaining the approximately 90-acre property for a planned half-mile short track.
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The main grandstands, front straight, pit road and pit road suites, which are all that remain of the old circuit, are to be integrated into the new race venue. But final plans for what the track will sound like have not been revealed.
Construction began on site last year and the track construction time is estimated to be between 12 and 18 months. This timetable turned out to be too optimistic.
“We have no updates on this effort at this time,” James Fuller, a spokesman for Hillwood and the Perot Group, said last month. Meanwhile, traffic around the Cherry Avenue site, wedged between the 10 and 210 freeways, has intensified.
NASCAR has sought to move part of its racing series from large superspeedways to half-mile oval tracks like those in Bristol, Tennessee, Martinsville, Virginia and North Wilkesboro, North Carolina. The resized Fontana facilities are part of this transition.
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“Our goal is really to be in Southern California long term,” Kennedy said. “We continued to work on our plans for Fontana. We have a number of different configurations and variations that the team has been working on to figure out what this track could look like (and) what other activities could happen on this piece of land that we have there.
In the meantime, NASCAR is exploring other opportunities in Southern California, Kennedy said, with reports last spring indicating the possibilities of a street race in San Diego were being explored.
The headwinds, however, seem to be pushing in the other direction. It was recently announced that Irwindale Speedway, which has hosted various lower-level NASCAR racing series for a quarter century, will host its last race on December 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 was originally published in Los Angeles Times.
