Fontana no fun for NASCAR

FONTANA, Calif. – This place just ain’t working.

A lot of good people have worked very hard to make Auto Club Speedway – the track formerly known as California Speedway – something more than a giant waste of stock car racing’s time. Bless their hearts, as we say in the South.

But it’s time to give it up.

For each thing that went well for NASCAR during Speedweeks, about three have gone wrong here this weekend. Any momentum this season might have had coming out Daytona is, as of the debacle that was Sunday’s Auto Club 500, now stuck in the mud.

In the late night hours, efforts were ongoing to resume a race that probably never should have started.

It had been stopped for several hours after 87 laps, 38 laps short of the halfway point at which it could be euthanized and still counted as an official event. Jeff Gordon had led 57 of those laps, but teammate Jimmie Johnson was leading when things were stopped just after 6 p.m. At press time, the race was scheduled to resume at 11 p.m.

Here’s a quick summary of what happened Sunday.

It rained all morning. It stopped. NASCAR dried the track – well, at least most of it. The race started. Water started leaking through the track. A half-dozen or so cars got wrecked, with one getting knocked upside down and another catching on fire. The race was stopped and people sawed grooves in the track trying to drain it. The race resumed. It rained. It stopped raining. It got dark. It rained. It stopped. It rained, this time for about 20 minutes.

But then, against all that is right and holy, jet dryers were sent back onto the track. At the moment Sunday became Monday in the East, they were still drying the track.

NASCAR tried hard to get this race in. Maybe too hard.