Hollywood? Nope, and certainly not Darlington

It has been a while since I’ve engaged in much idle speculation about changes to the NASCAR Cup schedule that aren’t going to happen, but being in California on Labor Day weekend always sort of puts me in that mood.

There’s just no good reason for us to be here this weekend. Everybody knows that, and I think that even includes the people all the way to the top in NASCAR. This is the fourth time the Cup series has raced here on this weekend, and the experiment has just completely failed.

Yeah, it’s laughably hot here this weekend. Actually, it’s probably not that funny since there’s a very real hazard that fans who brave the 105-degree (or more) heat to come to the track are going to have to be careful about things like heat stroke as they wait for the green flags. Almost nobody came to the track for qualifying on Friday, but it’s hard to find fault with fans for that. It was just too hot to enjoy anything about being here.

It’s usually hot in Darlington, S.C., on this weekend, too, and every once in a while a hurricane might be menacing that area around the first of September. That’s where I think we still ought to be going on this weekend every year, but it’s actually kind of unfair to advocate that solely on the basis of weather.

The Southern 500 began on Labor Day weekend in 1950 and for 50 years that’s what race fans did on this weekend. The people in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina embraced the event and made it part of their summer-ending holiday traditions, too.

It took a while for the race to take root, and maybe California Speedway hasn’t had enough time to create the same situation here. But there’s absolutely no sign it ever will.

Friday night after qualifying, the “fan zone” outside the track was a ghost town, locked up and shut down. One reason is that the track doesn’t allow people to camp outside the track. The only overnight guests allowed must be in the track’s infield, and that’s a very different approach from the one other tracks take.

There’s also a real dunderheadedness about how this track markets itself. Wednesday night, it brought in some drivers and some celebrities and held a $2,500 per ticket fund-raising “Hollywood party” about 50 miles away at a Los Angeles club.

Aside from the charity angle, who was that for?

People who hang out on the Sunset Strip are never, no matter how badly NASCAR desires it, going to be in stock-car racing’s demographic.

The folks who live around Fontana and the many cities north and east, aren’t stars. They’re hardworking people who endure the weather and other challenges of living in the Inland Empire year-round.

But when the track hires 43 model-actress wannabes to act as “ambassadors” and pitches its entire marketing approach around low-rent celebrities and around having a Wolfgang Puck restaurant in the fan zone, it seems like those people are being told the track isn’t particularly looking to do business with them.

I think California Speedway needs two races a year.

It’s easy for me to say this track should add variable banking to make the racing better, but it also hosts open-wheel events and that has to be considered, too. Pushing this track’s second date back into Chase for the Nextel Cup seems like an obvious idea, both because of the weather and because the interest level might ramp up.

The simple fix would be to swap this track with New Hampshire’s second date. New Hampshire would likely have better weather this time of the year, for one thing. But that doesn’t address the Darlington issue and it also would further skew the track mix in the Chase toward the intermediate style track.

I think the answer is Kansas Speedway. Put this race where Kansas is. Put Kansas where Dover is, the first week in June, and move Dover’s first race to the first weekend in May.

Slide Richmond back from that weekend to Mother’s Day Saturday night, and move Darlington back to Labor Day. You also leave Dover out of it and just put Kansas in the early May slot.

That leaves the mix of tracks in the Chase relatively unchanged – you actually get slightly more variety since you’re taking about a 1.5-mile track and putting in a 2-mile. It takes away Kansas’ value of having a race in the Chase, but a race in early May or early June in Kansas doesn’t ring any other obvious alarms in my head.

If you really want to get creative and put the open weekend that many people believe we need right before the Chase starts, I can make that work, too.

New Hampshire comes to Labor Day. There’s the open week, then Richmond opens the Chase.

California goes to where Kansas is. Kansas moves to Dover’s slot in June. Dover moves to where Richmond is now, and Richmond moves to the open date in April that will exist next year because NASCAR is eliminating the open date after the season’s second race here in February.

Getting Darlington back to Labor Day is more complicated in that scenario, and maybe that ship has sailed. Darlington’s doing pretty good on Mother’s Day weekend now, and if the trade-off for leaving it alone is a commitment that the track is going to get the money it needs to make the right improvements and the support it needs to keep that May race flourishing, then I am OK with that. Especially if it creates the kind of break at the end of the regular season that all of the rain we had at Michigan showed is needed.