someone at NASCAR must have come across this thread, read below. Now me personaly I am from South Carolina so you know I didn't approve of the loss of the Southern 500 on labor day weekend but NASCAR was doing what it thought would make them more marketable to the public by giving the west another date. Wrong, stick to your roots, drop the 2nd fontana race & bring back the labor day Southern 500. If you wanna 3rd California race then have them tear down Fontana & make it a concrete banked half mile & turn the rest of the land into somekind of large garden or something. Then get rid of the 2nd Loudon date.
Attendance woes continue at Auto Club Speedway
FONTANA, Calif. -- It's time to get off Gillian's Island.
The ruse is up. Gillian Zucker seems to be a very nice and sharp lady who works extremely hard at running Auto Club Speedway and trying to convince all of Southern California what the rest of America already knows: that NASCAR is pretty darn cool, and one of the best sports in the world to experience seeing in person.
But it's not working. It's nothing, really, to be ashamed about. The almighty National Football League couldn't even make it work in fickle Southern California.
Zucker, the track president at the facility where Sunday's Auto Club 500 was run, has been very creative with her marketing program. Not as creative as she is with fudging attendance numbers and convincing herself that her track really does deserve the two Sprint Cup dates it currently owns on the 38-race schedule (counting two non-points events), but creative nonetheless.
Sunday's official guesstimate on attendance was 72,000.
Seriously? The grandstands, which seat 92,000, might have been half full. Maybe. But that might even be a stretch. Let's say they were and give 'em 46,000 for that -- which would mean there were another 26,000 in the infield, where there couldn't have been half that.
A most generous but much closer to accurate estimate on the attendance would have been, say, 56,000. And that's not enough to justify continuing to come this far west two times a year. It's that simple.
Gillian's logic
We all know Kansas Speedway, a place that seats 81,687 and generally sells all of them plus puts another 10,000 in the infield, is about to get a second date. It's likely to happen as soon as next season, when the $680 million Hollywood Casino at Kansas Speedway is set to open overlooking Turn 2. If Kansas gets a second NASCAR weekend, the date has to come from somewhere.
Even Zucker knows it.
"I think every track has to be concerned that it would come from them," Zucker said Sunday while driver Jimmie Johnson, from the nearby San Diego area, was in the process of winning a highly entertaining race at the facility she runs. "And I will be out there kicking and screaming, fighting and scratching, to keep our two dates. I know what we bring to the economy of California. It's something that we're proud of, and it's something that this state needs.
"And I also believe there is a big opportunity for NASCAR here. There are a lot of fans out there. We just need to keep delivering a great product out on that race track." (Continued)
Well, unfortunately, it is not as simple as that. Auto Club Speedway has been holding two events per year since 2004 -- but the crowds have been falling off at both events, or so it appears to the naked eye, for at least the past three years. ("Official" attendance guesstimates by Captain Gillian and her ill-fated, lost-on-a-NASCAR-island crew may not support this assumption that nonetheless is widely held by everyone who actually has gone to a race there during that time span).
Wouldn't it be better for everyone involved to take one date away from Auto Club Speedway and gamble on getting better results in Kansas? For that matter, there are other venues that probably deserve the Sprint Cup date just as much as Kansas and infinitely more than ACS -- such as Las Vegas Motor Speedway, which has been begging for a second race weekend; or even Kentucky Motor Speedway, which is salivating for the chance at just one.
But Zucker isn't buying into the theory that one great race would be better than two seemingly mediocre ones (at least in terms of attendance) at her place.
"I personally think that a lot of emphasis is put on sellouts," Zucker said. "But you have to remember that these facilities are not all equal. If you have a facility that has 50,000 seats and it sells out, is that better than having a facility with 92,000 seats and might not? So I really don't know that selling out one race is better than having two that are almost there and on their way."
Poor Ms. Zucker. You are in denial.
Business time
Zucker also claimed Sunday that the economy is largely to blame for all the empty seats in her grandstands, and there is no doubt that is true. But the crowds began falling off even before the economy went in the tank.
The fact is that NASCAR probably was premature in the first place in awarding a second date to Southern California. You can't blame it for trying. Times were good back in '04. Nationwide interest in the sport was at an all-time high; television ratings and attendance virtually at every track were peaking. Plus it's a huge, relatively untapped market that seemed ripe for the picking. Los Angeles is 50 miles to the west of Auto Club Speedway, and San Diego is 108 miles to the south.
Zucker has relentlessly and tirelessly attempted to engage this vast and varied fan base. For that, she should be applauded. And there are no problems with the facility itself, which is fine. But these folks just don't care that much about racing, or at least not enough of them do.
A reporter asked Zucker on Sunday how she keeps from getting discouraged. She admitted the crowd was not as large as she would have liked.
"It's not as big as I want it to be. But you know what? I love NASCAR. I love it," she said. "And for me, when I was first introduced to this sport and I saw it for the first time, I felt like I had been missing something because I hadn't been experiencing it from the time when I was a small child. I want other people to have that opportunity.
"So I continue to be excited about the idea of introducing a community to this sport. And we continue to have a lot of people who haven't been exposed to it getting exposed to it. That charges me up. That's why I don't get discouraged."
Her enthusiasm and determination are admirable, even if her mathematical skills when figuring attendance figures are not.
But enough is enough. This West Coast Experiment has run its course, and it's not like the venue will be deprived of NASCAR altogether, as it still will have one date to sell. That makes so much more sense.
It's time for NASCAR to get down to business -- elsewhere on this spring date, beginning next season.
