Short Track Messiah Dale Earnhardt Jr. Gives Up on 28-Year-Old Historic Track to Make NASCAR Return

Back in 1991, you could find a 17-year-old Dale Earnhardt Jr. on Late Model stock car racetracks with his siblings, brother Kerry and sister Kelley. After maintaining and repairing his car through the week, the young talent would go to the now-retired Myrtle Beach Speedway in South Carolina where most of his early racing days went. When not on the now-defunct semi-bank asphalt, he would race at Concord Speedway, North Wilkesboro Speedway, South Boston Speedway, and Auto Club Raceway. With the last, he bagged 5 top-five finishes and countless of memories.

“I love Fontana, a lot of different grooves, fun race track,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said back in 2015 ahead of the Auto Club 400 race. However, the 2-mile superspeedway was shut down in 2023, with NASCAR selling all but 99 acres of the area. But the stock racing motorsports league always had plans for the SoCal speedway which made rounds since 2020 itself. The conversation of the overhaul caught some wind when NASCAR President Steve Phelps updated in 2023 that, “I would say that we are still planning on building a short track in Fontana; what the timing of that is, I don’t know. This isn’t the best time to be building based on inflation, the cost of capital, etc. But our intention is to continue to be in the Southern California market.”

While nothing came of it in the next two years, NASCAR finally gave an update when the West Region President Steve Allen told media in Phoenix earlier this month, “We’re going to do something. I just don’t know what and when yet.” But with Phelps already promising that “We’ve got renderings. We’ve got what it looks like. We are ready to go when the time is right,” and Allen’s recent words, maybe we are finally getting somewhere. Hence, you would think that the 26-time Cup Series race winner would welcome the thoughts with open arms. However, the businessman in him has some reservations.

In a recent Dale Jr Download episode, Dale Earnhardt Jr. initially lauded Fontana, California, calling it the best venue to have a short track. “I’ve always felt like what the West Coast has always needed was a really good Saturday night short-track a– kicking. We go out there, we run road courses, we had the big Fontana track…but one thing we haven’t taken to the West Coast market yet is Bristol or Martinsville. I’ve walked out of those racetracks many times wishing we can bottle that up and take it all across the country.”

However, being a sharp-eyed businessman himself, Dale Earnhardt Jr. can see the holes in the plan. The financial hassles accompanying the Fontana plan may be too much. “Even if NASCAR wants to do it, they can’t get it done…Think about the permits and challenges to build anything in the state of California, particularly around a sporting event or a speedway. Not only the timeline and the hoops to go through and get those permits and get that building code all sorted, but also the expense and the cost. It’s going to cost more money to build the facility than it will be worth to have. I don’t feel like it’s a financial success story…It’s probably going to be a bigger pain in the a–.”

Dale Earnhardt Jr. started a similar endeavor once and succeeded. He was one of the pioneers in the resurrection of North Wilkesboro Speedway, a 0.625-mile short track in North Carolina. Yet even Dale Jr himself is not so optimistic about lending a short-track racing flavor to Auto Club Speedway.

In 1997, Auto Club Speedway opened on the site of the old Kaiser steel mill in Fontana. The NASCAR Cup Series has held at least one race every year since then, with the exception of the COVID-19-affected season of 2021. But after Kyle Busch won the Cup Series race in 2023, the Southern California Speedway was torn down. NASCAR intended to reconstruct and reconfigure the 2-mile track into a half-mile short track. Yet given that this step would require a level of synergy with state and local lawmakers, NASCAR could not move forward with this plan.

Interestingly, even NASCAR agrees with Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s concerns. At the end of the day, they would do that which makes most business sense.

Yielding to the market’s whims

Things were a bit different in the previous generation. There used to be more than a dozen race tracks holding regular events across Southern California. However, those historic NASCAR tracks sat on land that grew more valuable over the years. Presently, only a handful of those remain – Irwindale Speedway was the last to shut down last year. They became part of a larger trend of iconic short tracks losing their status such as Greenville, S.C., and Midland, N.C., the heart of stock-car country.

After the final Fontana race in 2023, NASCAR reportedly sold 433 of the 522 acres to Ross Perot Jr.’s Dallas-based Hillwood Development Company and CBRE Investment Management for approximately $569 million.

Currently, the site which once hosted vibrant NASCAR races will host a logistics facility and industrial park with 6.6 million square feet of warehousing space. Accordingly, Dave Allen painfully reminded us that ultimately the racetrack needs to make financial sense. “The land and the cost of doing business, when you have a facility like we had in Fontana, it’s very, very challenging. At the end of the day, we’re a for-profit company and we have to make decisions that are good for the business so we can keep it going.”

Evidently, Dale Earnhardt Jr. may be right in his apprehensions that the Fontana plan is not feasible. Let us see what updates NASCAR throws us in this regard.