Auto Club Speedway: Fontana's Second Try at Racing Glory

This site once held a wartime steel mill and, before that, orange groves. What it held most recently was a two-mile NASCAR oval that outlasted its predecessor and then quietly faded out of the calendar.

Roger Penske broke ground here on November twenty-second, nineteen ninety-five, on land that had been the Kaiser Steel mill until the plant closed in nineteen eighty-three and was later cleaned up over years of environmental remediation. Penske modeled the new track on his D-shaped Michigan Speedway, with wide sweeping turns that encouraged side-by-side racing at speeds exceeding two hundred miles per hour on the straightaways.

California Speedway, as it was then called, opened on June twentieth, nineteen ninety-seven. The debut NASCAR race drew enormous crowds. Jeff Gordon won that inaugural event, and for several years the track attracted some of the largest attendance figures in Western motorsports.

In two thousand eight the Automobile Club of Southern California purchased the naming rights, and the facility became the Auto Club Speedway. The track hosted NASCAR events every year from nineteen ninety-seven through two thousand twenty-three, running through the pandemic year with no fans, recovering, and then finally going quiet.

In February twenty twenty-three the track held its final race under the oval configuration. NASCAR and Penske had announced plans to demolish the oval and rebuild the site as a short oval, a shorter and more intimate format that the sanctioning body believed would produce closer racing and better television. Demolition of the two-mile oval began in October twenty twenty-three.

As of the mid-two thousand twenties, the rebuilt track had not yet opened. What sits here now is essentially a construction site on the edge of a distribution-center economy, waiting to see whether a smaller successor can succeed where two larger tracks have not.