An update or two from the Left Coast

RANCHO CUCAMONGA, Calif. -- Monday was laundry day for your correspondent, who'll make the drive back over the mountains to Las Vegas Tuesday to move into position for the season's third Sprint Cup/Nationwide weekend at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

That means I won't be back in Charlotte for the press conference and noon Tuesday formally announcing the plans for an United States-based Formula One team. That press conference will be held at the Speed cable television network's studios and carried live on that channel.

I've talked to Ken Anderson, who along with Peter Windsor are to be the "principals" of that team in F1 terminology, one time on the telephone when he confirmed the rumors that this announcement was coming up. That was two weeks ago while I was in Daytona and since then I've had probably 10 e-mails from people who want me to get them in touch with Anderson so they can go to work for the F1 team. I also had a couple of people who sell real estate looking for contacts so they could offer buildings that now stand idle.

I don't think they believed me when I tell them that I've only had that one conversation and everything I know I've put in the paper. Today's announcement should provide at least a few more details.

What it will more likely do is set off more speculation about who might be chosen to drive for an American F1 team. The focus of this new team, Anderson told me, was going to be American and that would mean American drivers. Danica Patrick's name, predictably, already came up and she shot that down. I asked AJ Allmendinger about it Friday at California and he seemed amused by the question, but he also said that he'd be a fool to say absolutely not when as of right now he doesn't have a full-time ride for 2009.

By 5 p.m. Tuesday, I suspect somebody will have spun up a rumor about a prominent Cup driver or two. Kyle Busch was supposed to go to Japan late last year to take one of Toyota's F1 cars for a spin. That fell through, but the fact that Busch would be interested in touching the wheel might be enough to set some people off.

Inside the NASCAR circles this week, I heard a lot of skepticism about the USF1 idea. These guys know how tough it is to find sponsorship for NASCAR teams right now and scoff at the notion that Anderson and Windsor can find the money -- upwards of $100 million -- and the sheer number of smart racers it would take to get a team from idea to reality in time to go racing in 2010.

I guess we'll have to see about all of that, won't we?

On another quick matter, people listening to The Morning Drive on Sirius NASCAR Radio Monday morning got a little "bonus" coverage when one of our commercials didn't fire as it should and co-host Mike Bagley and I were still on the air when we didn't know we were.

We were continuing a conversation we'd had with a caller about the idea of pulling races away from Auto Club Speedway in Fontana. Mike was saying how fans out here don't have as many places they can choose to go as fans back east, and I was telling him that I have no problem with the fans out here. I think they're good fans, but they just know better than to expect good racing at a track which hasn't given them that.

At one point when I thought we were off-air, I said, "This track sucks. It stinks. It blows chunks." When the show was over, I got calls warning me that went out over the air. My reaction was "So?" It's not like I didn't write that two or three times over the weekend.

During Sunday night's Cup race, Darrell Waltrip was talking about how an engineer once told him he dealt with drivers who had multiple complaints about their race cars. "Fix the first problem first," was what DW said. The idea is that the first thing the driver complains about is the problem that needs to be addressed first. Fix that, and some of the other problems might go away, too.

In terms of racing in Southern California, NASCAR faces several challenges. The crowds have not been good. There has been difficulty finding the right marketing message. But the "first" problem here is this track is wrong. It's a 2-mile track and it seems like it's almost a mile wide. A driver can spin here and not find anything to hit. The leader becomes Superman in clean air.

Fix the race track. No, don't bank what you've got and put restrictor plates on the cars. That's dumb. Make the track 1 or 1-1/4 miles and put progressive banking in it. Put on a decent race or two and then see if that doesn't help you fill up the seats and get more attention from the SoCal media.

Fix the first problem first.