Saying goodbye to Auto Club Speedway -- but not for long
It will be a bittersweet Sunday afternoon when the checkered flag waves in Southern California.
After Sunday’s 400-mile NASCAR Cup Series race in Fontana, Auto Club Speedway (ACS) will be no more. Well, the 2-mile, high-speed ACS that we've known and loved since NASCAR first raced there in 1997 and for over two decades afterward will be no more, that is.
Once the final fan leaves ACS on Sunday, demolition will begin almost immediately. And once the debris is hauled away, construction will begin on a new state-of-the-art half-mile track. Think a modern-day Bristol and you get the idea of what ACS will become.
Depending on construction timelines, stock car racing will return to ACS in either late 2024 or early 2025 with a new facelift that will even make a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon envious -- not to mention all of the other tracks on the Cup circuit.
The legendary 2.0-mile superspeedway that rose from the grounds of a demolished steel mill, will see a major changeover that will make ACS a place NASCAR teams, drivers and fans will love to come out to. NASCAR plans on selling off a large amount of the 568-acre property on which the speedway sits to build an entertainment and hotel complex that will be the envy of most other tracks in the series.
But before we say our goodbyes to Auto Club Speedway -- as we currently know it -- let’s take a look back at how it came to be, the other SoCal tracks that came before it, and what we should expect from the new speedway in the coming years.
In the Shadows of Other Legendary Venues
ACS was not the first Southern California venue to host professional auto racing, and it certainly won’t be the last.
Car culture and Southern California have gone hand in hand since the mid-to-late 1940s, right after the end of World War II. Organized drag racing got its start in SoCal and for nearly five decades, NHRA both opened and closed its season in nearby Pomona. In Long Beach, the annual Grand Prix is the biggest race on the IndyCar schedule outside of the prestigious Indianapolis 500.
But before Fontana hosted NASCAR racing, the Cup Series previously raced at two other facilities.
One of the past venues NASCAR raced at was actually located just a few miles away from where Auto Club stands (well, currently stands).
Ontario Motor Speedway
In the 1960s, the rising popularity of the Indianapolis 500 drove investors to want to build a major speedway in Southern California to host equally popular events.
Thus, “The Indianapolis of the West” was born.
Opening in August 1970, the Ontario Motor Speedway was a 2.5-mile oval with 9-degree banking in the corners - an almost exact replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
The massive facility could handle crowds of up to 180,000 spectators and was built to host all major forms of auto racing. The oval hosted both IndyCar and NASCAR, a 3.194-mile, 20-turn infield road course was built with Formula One racing in mind and the front stretch also doubled as an NHRA-sanctioned dragstrip.
Cup cars raced at Ontario on nine separate occasions from 1971-80. The first two races in 1971 and ‘72 were held in late February and early March and were both won by A.J. Foyt. NASCAR did not visit OMS in 1973 due to ownership changes at the facility, but from ‘74-80 the track hosted the season finale in November and saw Buddy Allison, Buddy Baker, David Person, Neil Bonnett and Benny Parsons all reach Victory Lane.
While OMS was a state-of-the-art facility at its time, crowds began to dwindle as the decade progressed. The track property was eventually sold to the Chevron Land Corporation in 1980 and redeveloped. The Ontario Mills shopping mall currently resides where OMS once stood.
Riverside International Raceway
On 48 separate occasions from 1958 to 1988, NASCAR raced at the legendary Riverside International Raceway.
In addition to hosting sports cars and open-wheel racing, the 2.620-mile, 9-turn road course gave NASCAR drivers a chance to turn both left and right. It even served as the season opener from 1970-81 (yes, there was a time when the Daytona 500 wasn’t the first points race of the year).
Road courses were a rarity in NASCAR at that time, and many open-wheel drivers found success moonlighting in the stock car races at the facility. Dan Gurney won in a Cup car at Riverside five times. A.J. Foyt, Parnelli Jones, and Mark Donahue would also win in Cup there. But don’t worry, the good ole boys from down South still won plenty of times at Riverside, as well. Richard Petty, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough and Darrel Waltrip all won there multiple times. Bill Eliott scored his first Cup Series win there, too, in 1983.
However, as the urban sprawl that Southern California is well known for slowly encroached upon the race track, NIMBY residents began to shake their fists at the facility. The value of the land Riverside sat upon was so valuable it was only a matter of time before land developers came calling.
On June 12, 1988, NASCAR hosted its final Cup race at Riverside, won by Rusty Wallace. Demolition of the track began the following year.
Local fans would have to wait a few years before they’d see another Cup Series race in Southern California. But Riverside certainly would not be the last track in the area to host NASCAR.
NASCAR Returns to SoCal
In 1994, legendary team owner Roger Penske and the Kaiser Steel Corporation announced a deal to construct a 2.0-mile superspeedway on the site of a former steel mill in Fontana. The track, which was originally named California Speedway, was an almost exact clone of Michigan International Speedway, which Penske owned at the time.
The track was originally designed with Indy cars in mind. One day later, CART announced it would hold an annual race at the facility. However, three months later, NASCAR announced that it would hold a Cup Series race at the facility upon completion. It was the first time that NASCAR had ever announced intentions to race at a track that had not yet been completed (with the exception of Daytona International Speedway).
The first race to ever take place at California Speedway was a NASCAR Winston West Series (now ARCA Menards Series West) event won by Ken Schrader on June 21, 1997. The very next day, California native Jeff Gordon won the first Cup Series race at the facility, the appropriately named California 500.
As the years passed, several other legendary drivers would be victorious at California Speedway and as its name eventually morphed into Auto Club Speedway. Mark Martin won the second annual event in 1998. Rusty Wallace won in 2001, and the following year, a rookie from California named Jimmie Johnson would score his first NASCAR Cup Series victory at the facility. Johnson is the winningest driver in track history, with six total victories.
International Speedway Corporation bought ACS and several other facilities from Penske in 1999. In 2004, NASCAR announced that the track would host a second annual race at the track over Labor Day weekend.
This new race replaced the Southern 500 at Darlington and the move greatly angered numerous fans who claimed that NASCAR was abandoning its Southern roots to chase dollars in other markets. NASCAR’s grand idea would eventually backfire however, as the addition of two races at Auto Club greatly hurt attendance at the facility. NASCAR reverted to only hosting the annual spring race at Fontana beginning in 2011, and in 2015, Darlington was once again awarded its traditional Labor Day date to host the Southern 500.
The Clash at the Coliseum
It will be a few years before NASCAR returns to Fontana, but in the meantime, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum will continue to provide entertainment for Southern California race fans.
The Busch Light Clash, NASCAR’s longtime preseason exhibition race, moved to the legendary venue in 2022 after years of being held at Daytona.
A temporary quarter-mile bullring was constructed inside the Coliseum, which is the home of USC football and has previously hosted events like the Super Bowl and the World Series.
While the Fontana facility undergoes renovations, it is expected that the Coliseum will serve as Southern California’s lone home for NASCAR in the interim. There are even rumors of hosting a points-paying race there.
Although NASCAR may be saying goodbye to the current configuration of Auto Club Speedway as we know it, the sport certainly isn’t saying goodbye to Southern California. As we’ve seen, the sport has a very rich history there, and by the looks of it, a very rich future ahead of it as well.