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THATSRACIN.COM OPINION
DAVID POOLE
The Charlotte Observer
Sunday, Feb. 24, 2008
FONTANA, Calif. – This place just ain’t working.
A lot of good people have worked very hard to make Auto Club Speedway – the track formerly known as California Speedway – something more than a giant waste of stock car racing’s time. Bless their hearts, as we’d say in the South.
But it’s time to give it up.
For each thing that went well for NASCAR during Speedweeks, about three went wrong this weekend. Any momentum this season might have had coming out Daytona is, as of the debacle that was Sunday’s Auto Club 500, now officially stuck in the mud.
After a two-hour rain delay before the start and a one-hour interruption for the recurrence of a problem that should have either been fixed Friday or caused the postponement of the entire weekend, NASCAR waited five hours after it rained again before finally postponing the Sprint Cup Series race until 1 p.m. (Eastern time) Monday.
The race was halted after 87 laps, 38 laps short of the halfway point at which it could be euthanized and still counted as an official event.
Jeff Gordon had led 57 of those laps, but teammate Jimmie Johnson was leading when things were stopped just after 9 p.m. Eastern.
Here’s a quick summary of what happened Sunday.
It rained all morning. It stopped. NASCAR dried the track – well, at least most of it.
The race started.
Water started leaking through the track. A half-dozen or cars got wrecked, with one getting knocked upside down and another catching on fire. The race was stopped and people sawed grooves in the track trying to de-irrigate it.
The race resumed. It rained. It stopped. It got dark. It rained. It stopped. It rained again.
And then, against all that is right and holy, jet dryers were sent back onto the track. As Sunday became Monday in the East, they were still trying to dry the track. But as it got colder and damper, those efforts couldn’t keep up.
Finally, around 2 a.m. Eastern, they gave up.
So now, we’ll try again Monday. The now twice-postponed Nationwide Series race is scheduled to be run following the Cup race.
That is, of course, unless locusts, frogs or rivers that turn to blood rose up to wipe out this God-forsaken place.
The last time NASCAR came here it was as hot as the face of the sun. This weekend has been, as Dario Franchitti said, “bloody freezing.”
You can’t help the weather, can you? Well, you couldn’t help it in Rockingham, either. You remember the track there, right? North Carolina Speedway, the place often fought foul weather and consequently had trouble drawing a crowd?
Only there, it had consequences. Rockingham lost race dates when people didn’t show up. But instead of threatening to take races away from here, NASCAR keeps doubling over backward to prop up this joint.
People don’t show up here either, and who could blame them? God love the ones who hung in there all weekend. They ought to get NASCAR medals or something.
NASCAR tried hard to get this race in. Maybe too hard. Water seeping through cracks in the track had caused problems on Friday. These “weepers” were back Sunday, but the green flag flew anyway – two hours late after morning rain.
The wet spots were then blamed for two wrecks before and the race was halted.
“We should not be racing on that race track right now,” said Denny Hamlin, whose Toyota slammed the wall in Turn 3 on Lap 14.
On Lap 21, Casey Mears’ Chevrolet snapped loose in Turn 2 and slammed into the wall. Three other cars wound up in that crash, including Dale Earnhardt Jr., and after that the race went under a red flag.
“We got going a little too soon,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “There were a lot of wet spots out there. You do the best you can.”
Earnhardt Jr. got collected when Mears bounced off the wall. Sam Hornish Jr. hit Reed Sorenson, and then before Hornish could stop he ran into the back of Mears’ car, picking it up and sending it over on its side. Fire broke out in Hornish’s car, but workers got there quickly to put it out and none of the drivers was injured.
It was about that time that NASCAR decided to try to fix the race track, sending out workers with saws to cut drainage grooves into the racing surface.
You know what would have been better? About 50 sticks of dynamite.
Tom Cruise showed up here Sunday. Normally that would have been enough to send NASCAR and track officials into a paroxysm of ecstasy. Somebody actually famous was here, as opposed to most of the B- and C-list folks usually passed off as celebrities.
But even that wasn’t enough.
This was so bad it wasn’t even laughable.
It was, to use another term we Southerners like, actually right pitiful.