SoCal has issues, but it's where sport needs to be

They built it too far from the city. They added too many seats. They overestimated the market demand. They designed a rather bland layout that doesn't produce the best racing. They haven't sold an event out in five years. They took a holiday weekend from one of NASCAR's more traditional tracks, bruising feelings in the progress. Auto Club Speedway of Southern California, the piñata of the Sprint Cup circuit, has heard it all before.

Auto Club Speedway

Race Winners

Year	Winner	Make
1997	Jeff Gordon	Chevrolet
1998	Mark Martin	Ford
1999	Jeff Gordon	Chevrolet
2000	Jeremy Mayfield	Ford
2001	Rusty Wallace	Ford
2002	Jimmie Johnson	Chevrolet
2003	Kurt Busch	Ford
2004	Jeff Gordon	Chevrolet
	Elliott Sadler	Ford
2005	Greg Biffle	Ford
	Kyle Busch	Chevrolet
2006	Matt Kenseth	Ford
	Kasey Kahne	Dodge
2007	Matt Kenseth	Ford
	Jimmie Johnson	Chevrolet
2008	Carl Edwards	Ford
	Jimmie Johnson	Chevrolet

Every trip to the big 2-mile oval in Fontana brings the same things: images of the palm trees lining the backstretch, shots of majestic Cucamonga Peak, attempts to tie an Inland Empire sports venue in with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, and -- as sure as the swallows return to Capistrano -- traditionalists line up to take healthy cuts at a speedway that's become a concrete and steel testament to the backlash over NASCAR's major market push. California doesn't have the Labor Day date anymore, and the track's position in a region that's the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis surely isn't helping it sell tickets. No matter. People will point to the empty seats that will surely be evident in Sunday's race as proof of a facility carried away by ambition.

And maybe some of those claims have merit. Maybe the tie-ins to Los Angeles are a bit of stretch, given that Auto Club Speedway is 54 miles from the theater that will host Sunday's night's Academy Awards, and that the U.S. Census Bureau considers the Inland Empire a completely separate metropolitan statistical area from greater L.A. Maybe management shouldn't have expanded from the relatively modest seating capacity of 71,000 the track started with to the 92,000 seats it holds today. Maybe the folks at parent company International Speedway Corp. misjudged the market, seeing that string of single-race sellouts from 1997-2003 as evidence that they could sell twice as many seats each year. Maybe the track's brass hasn't helped itself by often acting like an attendance issue doesn't exist.

No question, in retrospect, things could have been done better. But lost in all this annual Fontana bashing is one unarguable, irrefutable fact -- that NASCAR's premier series absolutely needs a presence in Southern California. (Continued)