gained’t go to Southern California subsequent yr and there’s no certainty when the stock-car racing sequence will return with development on a brand new observe in unincorporated San Bernardino County slowed.
NASCAR, which moved its 2025 season-opening occasion from the to Winston-Salem, N.C., after three years, had hoped to race in Fontana subsequent yr, however the deliberate half-mile oval observe being constructed on the positioning of the Auto Membership Speedway gained’t be accomplished in time — and there’s no timeline for when will probably be achieved.
“What that appears like sooner or later stays to be seen,” Ben Kennedy, NASCAR’s govt vice-president and chief venue & racing info officer, mentioned when the 2025 schedule was launched this yr. “Sadly we weren’t in a position to have it on the 2025 schedule, however bullish about getting it again on the schedule.”
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Except for 2021, when the schedule was hampered by the pandemic, NASCAR has run at the very least one race in Southern California , when the opened on the positioning of the outdated Kaiser metal mill.
“It’s a large marketplace for us,” Kennedy added. “No. 2 when it comes to the amount of NASCAR followers, an enormous media marketplace for us. Strategically it makes a number of sense for us to be in Southern California.”
The absence of the race additionally will take a chunk out of the native financial system. The UC Riverside Heart for Financial Forecasting and Improvement, which was shuttered final yr, estimated that the NASCAR race had an financial influence of $148.7 million in its final survey in 2017. Adjusted for inflation, that might be practically $192 million in the present day.
The 2-mile, low-banked, D-shaped oval drew 85,000 followers for its first NASCAR occasion, however when the sequence added a second annual race on the observe in 2004, attendance fell and in 2014, the grandstands have been reconfigured to decrease capability to 68,000. NASCAR didn’t launch attendance figures for its remaining race on the observe final yr however mentioned it was offered out.
Ten days after that race, NASCAR offered 433 of the 522 acres of the observe’s footprint to Ross Perot Jr.’s Dallas-based Hillwood Improvement firm and CBRE Funding Administration for roughly $569 million, reported to be a document value for an industrial land deal. The positioning will likely be transformed right into a logistics facility and industrial park with 6.6 million sq. toes of warehousing spacing, with NASCAR retaining possession of roughly 90 acres for a deliberate half-mile quick observe.
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The primary grandstands, entrance straight, pit highway and pit highway suites, that are all that stay of the outdated raceway, are to be integrated into the brand new racing venue. However definitive plans on what the observe will seem like haven’t been launched.
Building started on the web site final yr with the construct time on the observe estimated at between 12 and 18 months. That timeline has proved overly optimistic.
“We now have no updates on that effort presently,” James Fuller, a spokesman for Hillwood and the Perot Group, mentioned final month. Within the meantime, site visitors across the web site on Cherry Avenue, sandwiched between the ten and 210 freeways, has snarled.
NASCAR has been seeking to transition a part of its racing sequence from giant superspeedways to half-mile oval tracks like those at Bristol, Tenn., Martinsville, Va., and North Wilkesboro, N.C. The resized Fontana facility is a part of that transition.
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“Our objective is absolutely to be in Southern California long run,” Kennedy mentioned. “We’ve continued to work on our plans for Fontana. We now have plenty of totally different configurations and variations the group has been engaged on for what that observe would possibly seem like [and] what are the opposite actions that would occur on that parcel of land that we’ve got there.”
Within the meantime, NASCAR is different alternatives in Southern California, Kennedy mentioned, with experiences final spring saying the chances of a avenue race in San Diego have been being explored.
The headwinds seem like pushing the opposite means, nevertheless. It was not too long ago introduced that the Irwindale Speedway, house to quite a lot of lower-tier NASCAR racing sequence for a quarter-century, on Dec. 21.
IDS Actual Property, which purchased the positioning in 2022, plans to bulldoze the observe and construct an industrial park instead.
This story initially appeared in .
