This is it: No more excuses for Auto Club Speedway

Let's get this straight right away: NASCAR very much needs to race in Southern California, a place where the series has had a presence, off and on, since Marshall Teague's victory at half-mile Carrell Speedway in 1951.

The region is steeped in car culture, complete with iconic images of surfboard-laden Woodie station wagons, cruising El Caminos, street-racing imports and Ronny and the Daytonas' Little GTO. It's where virtually all automobile manufacturers base their design studios. It's a market of 17 million people, the largest the Sprint Cup tour competes in, where the freeways are always jammed and the car is less a mere conveyance and more a way of life.

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So enough about what happened to Darlington or Rockingham or North Wilkesboro, enough of the bitterness over the bungled attempt to move the Labor Day weekend date out west, enough blaming Auto Club Speedway of Southern California for things that were completely beyond its control.

Funny, nobody seemed to complain much about NASCAR in Southern California when Parnelli Jones was winning at Ascot Park, or Marvin Panch was winning at Willow Springs, or A.J. Foyt was winning at Ontario, or Rusty Wallace was winning at Riverside. There was none of this square-peg-into-round-hole thinking then. When it comes to NASCAR in greater Los Angeles, the kind of antipathy on display today is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Yes, NASCAR needs to be at Auto Club Speedway, where the sport's top series races on Sunday. Despite all the anger over the closure of some more traditional Southern speedways, despite all the lingering resentment over NASCAR's national push, racing in Southern California is an absolute no-brainer. There are just too many people in the region, too many cars packing the highways, too many lingering memories of the 88 previous premier-level events in the area for NASCAR to simply give up on the big track with the palm trees lining the backstretch.

But does it have to race there twice a year? Given the track's glaring shortcomings in the area of attendance, given that the place sold out for seven consecutive years before it was awarded a second annual date and its grandstand capacity was expanded to its current 92,000, you have to wonder if this would be one of those facilities better off with one date than two.

Sure, every track wants two races. Not all tracks can handle them. Look at Darlington Raceway, which struggled so mightily under the weight of two annual races that people thought the place was on the verge of being shut down. Now it has one race, and it's selling out. Sure, Darlington seats 30,000 fewer people than California. But actual attendance at the two tracks in recent years has been running neck-and-neck. (Continued)