Auto Club Speedway president pleased with Cup crowd
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FONTANA, Calif. – NASCAR didn’t fill every seat at Auto Club Speedway on Sunday, but it filled enough to make track president Gillian Zucker happy.
NASCAR estimated race attendance at 78,000 while one of the local papers estimated it at 55,000. Prior to the race, Zucker said she would have considered being 10 percent off the 2008 Labor Day weekend attendance (which NASCAR estimated at 70,000) a success because of the rains that suspended the event last year and the current economic times. The track's grandstands seat 92,000.
The track appeared to be about two-thirds to three-quarters full at the start of the race. The race lasted 3 hours, 40 minutes – including 37 laps run under caution because of intermittent drizzle – and empty seats became more noticeable throughout the event.
Track parent company International Speedway Corp. doesn’t announce attendance figures, but Zucker said she was “happy.”
The track had reduced ticket prices on some of the seats on the lower parts of the grandstands and ran several promotions, such as one where fans got tickets to the race if they spent a certain amount of money at a grocery store.
"The doom and gloom about the fact that California cannot support NASCAR is dead wrong,” Zucker told reporters Sunday night.
She said the track had ticket holders from all 50 states and 12 countries.
“That really says an awful lot about how passionate people are that they are willing to travel such far distances still for their sport,” Zucker said.
The track’s 2-mile configuration at times leads to strung-out racing, but the event Sunday did feature a close battle between Matt Kenseth and Jeff Gordon near the end.
“The quality of racing is everything,” Zucker said. “The races are not boring. They’re different. When you look at what different race tracks have to offer, they offer different styles of racing. We have a very wide race track, and what you see is a racing surface that gives a lot of room for drivers.”
Zucker said she only received one complaint from a fan about the 3 p.m. local start time. The fan was planning on traveling five hours to the event. She said Fox requested a late start time, and she didn’t have an issue with it because the Chase For The Sprint Cup race later in the season will be a day race (12:15 p.m. local start) and her fans wanted a race run at least partially at night.
“If I didn’t think [the start time] was the right thing for people here, absolutely I could be out there saying I don’t think this is the right thing,” Zucker said.
