On the Right Track
A NASCAR BLOG BY Jeff Gluck
Fans lose in Fontana
FONTANA, Calif. - The remaining fans at Auto Club Speedway showered the track with boos, angrily voicing their opinions about NASCAR's decision to postpone Sunday's Cup race after a five-hour delay.
Way to go, NASCAR. If officials were going to give up on trying to finish the Auto Club 500, why did they wait until 11 p.m. PST to do so? How about calling it when it poured rain at 6:15 p.m.? Or how about calling it after an hour or two when it seemed the track was not going to get dried? At some point, NASCAR realized it wasn't going to be able to restore racing conditions, and someone should have figured that out well before 2 a.m. EST.
NASCAR will get widely skewered for its decision, and rightfully so. It should have sent all the fans and teams home hours before it actually did.
Either finish drying the track to completion and finish the race, or call off the race until Monday when it began pouring rain.
But to wait five hours and then go home? Just awful.
The sanctioning body wanted to give back to its core fan this year? Well, about 3,000 of those core fans were still in the stands when NASCAR postponed the race - no doubt most, if not all of them, had been at the track since 7 or 8 a.m.
If I were a fan who devoted my weekend to this debacle, I would never go to another NASCAR race. Ever.
I feel sick for the fans who actually made an effort to support this sport on Sunday. There aren't that many race fans in Southern California to begin with, and now NASCAR has probably alienated some of the most loyal ones it had.
NASCAR can't control the weather, but it can control its decisions based on the weather. And in this case, the decisions were terrible.
Jeff Gluck
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Jeff Gluck has covered NASCAR since 2004. He has worked for NASCAR Scene as an associate editor since 2007.
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Comments
3 responses to "Fans lose in Fontana". Post a Comment.
Frank Arnold said:
Feb 25, 2008 at 9:39 AMFirst they hose Robby Gordon now they hose the fans...way to go NASCAR, your off to a good start...chances are you'll be giving tickets away by the end of the year
LINDA DEMORROW said:
Feb 25, 2008 at 9:48 AMThis was indeed a comedy of errors. Only it wasn't funny. In the eight years I've been a fan, I had only missed one race until last night. I truly feel sorry for all the fans who stayed around only to be thwarted at 2:00 EST. The race really should never have been allowed to start if the drivers are to believed. Wadda mess!
Johnny Lewis said:
Mar 2, 2008 at 10:18 PMThe fans lose at Fontana simply because there is a race at that track.