Atlanta inherits a weekend that's not always easy sell

For decades it was viewed as one of the highest of NASCAR's high holidays, a Labor Day weekend that was synonymous with one race and one place. In hindsight, everything looks so perfect, so glorious. It seems simple -- turn back the clock, reunite Labor Day with Darlington Raceway and its re-christened Southern 500, and everybody is happy again.

But as is so often the case, all that longing for the good old days can overshadow just how problematic and difficult those days could be.

Time to face facts: Regardless of the racetrack, Labor Day weekend has been a burden for some time now. The people who pine for a return to Darlington conveniently forget about how that race failed to sell out for five of its final six incarnations -- this at a track with just 60,000 seats -- the exception being the final Labor Day Southern 500 in 2003, when everyone came to wave goodbye.

Oh sure, it all seems so romantic now. But Labor Day at Darlington wasn't always as warm and fuzzy as some remember it to be. There were too many 100-degree days, too many tropical storm warnings, too many steamy Sunday afternoons where sitting in those metal seats felt like baking in a convection oven.

So off it went, west to Southern California and what seemed like a sure thing. NASCAR's biggest market. A track that hadn't had so much as an empty seat in its first seven years. But somebody overestimated the demand. Somebody forgot to look at weather trends. Nobody realized that Fontana can feel more like Phoenix than Los Angeles. And suddenly a can't-miss prospect turned into an embarrassment, a major-market race weekend in stifling 110-degree conditions that kept people away in droves.

Labor Day seemed like a blessing to Auto Club Speedway. It turned out to be a curse for a facility that's still looking for its first sellout since 2003.

And now, it's Atlanta's turn. The release of the 2009 Sprint Cup schedule involved a shakeup that entailed Atlanta Motor Speedway essentially trading its fall weekend for California's Labor Day race, with Talladega Superspeedway's second event moving back a few weeks to accommodate the swap.

Both California and Atlanta, two facilities with a history of attendance issues, had been lobbying NASCAR for date changes. Atlanta sees enough potential in Labor Day weekend that it traded a Chase race -- something almost every track wants -- for a Sunday night event.

"At the end of the day, we felt like the opportunity to have a night event in a summertime setting on a holiday weekend overshadowed the opportunity to be in the Chase," Atlanta president Ed Clark said. "It was something we certainly looked at, considered and evaluated very diligently. Hopefully we're going to prove that we were right, so we both come out more favorably making the move we made."

Will it work? Certainly Atlanta needed something to try to galvanize its market, which can be every bit as fickle as the one in Southern California. The track has wasted no time in hyping the arrival of night Cup racing in Atlanta, where the average daytime temperature on Labor Day is 86 degrees. And then there are the untold number of core fans who are still clearly disillusioned over the thought of NASCAR sending one of its most traditional race weekends to a relatively unproven Southern California track.

The 2009 schedules feature realigned dates. Starting times and television information will be announced at a later date.

• Cup Series
• Nationwide Series
• Truck Series

Labor Day always seemed like a big family picnic at Darlington, and in California they tried to dress it up like Hollywood. It never fit. Five years later, the hard feelings still remain, embittered by the empty seats on display in California every spring and fall.

Atlanta's not Darlington, but in terms of both geography and history, it's not very far removed. If Clark and his staff can win over those core fans, maybe Atlanta can do for Labor Day what Darlington did for Mother's Day, another holiday weekend that once left track promoters wringing their hands.

"First and foremost, we don't think it's going to be something where it's an automatic sellout. It's going to take considerable effort, a lot of smarts, a lot of planning, a lot of work to increase our crowd," Clark said. "A night race doesn't automatically mean you're going to do it. At the same time one week earlier, we all know the success of Bristol Motor Speedway, what's happened up there. We know it can be done.

"I think part of it is how the first event goes off, and the tradition we establish, and how we bring our community in as partners with us to welcome fans who come here from all over the United States. We know we have work to do. We can't do things as we've done traditionally, and we're working on ways to change that and make this almost like a new event."

And then there's the other half of this equation, that 92,000-seat enigma in Southern California. To be certain, the facility now known as Auto Club Speedway has received no help from the calendar, with one race in the rainy season and amid the post-Daytona 500 hangover, and another choked by a miasma of stifling heat.

Track president Gillian Zucker will tell anyone who'll listen about the lengths to which they've gone in promoting the place, from high-end tactics like partnering with the Los Angeles Angels baseball team to more pedestrian methods like doorknob hangers and advertising trucks that just drive around and around. There's no lack of effort.

But there is a lot of bristling from the executive offices of Auto Club Speedway when the subject of empty seats comes up. Zucker likes to call Southern California an "emerging market" for NASCAR, even though the sport's top series has competed in the region 82 times dating back to Eddie Pagan's victory at Ascot Stadium in 1957, even though those first seven events at Fontana were lock-solid sellouts.

Now, with a date in October, a spot in the Chase, and a metro area of 23 million people to draw from, it would seem the perfect time for California to prove itself as a two-event facility. But in this economy, and in that market, there are no guarantees.

At least it's shed the encumbrance of Labor Day, cut loose all those uncomfortable and unfair comparisons with Darlington, freed itself from all those true believers who thought the track was siphoning off a piece of NASCAR's history. Now that weight settles on Atlanta, which has been tasked with remaking Labor Day weekend into the grand, homespun celebration of NASCAR that so many believed it to be.

Meanwhile, Darlington has expanded its grandstand-seating capacity and sold out four consecutive races held on temperate spring nights. Who's the loser here again?

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.