Excitement, uncertainty fuel Fontana fascination
Sunday’s race to feature the old, new and unfamiliar to usher in West Coast swing
The asphalt at Auto Club Speedway is older than Austin Cindric.
The Next Gen car that the Daytona 500 champion drove over that asphalt to the pole Saturday is so new that most of the NASCAR Cup Series drivers still haven’t figured out how to keep it out of spins or off of the wall.
This California combo of the old and the new, the familiar and the unfamiliar, could make for a fascinating race Sunday at Auto Club Speedway when NASCAR’s West Coast swing gets underway.
“For the next four months … it is about who is the best learners,” Cindric said.
Everything looks unpredictable in NASCAR this year, as evidenced by the unlikely early season dominance of the 23-year-old rookie who sped to his first career pole one week after his first victory.
“There is so much learning and so much going on, and it is all happening really fast,” Cindric said. “As a driver, you can’t be distracted by the crashes or mistakes, or the short amount of time (in practice). I had all the data I needed today to learn what I needed to do and go apply it. It’s fun to be able to go do that.”
The second race of the NASCAR season also is both the start of something big and the possible end of something beloved.
The teams will begin the seasonlong challenge of familiarizing themselves with their new equipment in a series of unfamiliar settings. They were given only 15 minutes of practice Saturday to prepare for qualifying for their first race on a 2-mile track with the brand-new car, which partly led to a qualifying session with nearly a dozen wrecks and spins.
It’s an auspicious development for fans and TV viewers, but the start of a long night for teams scrambling to get their cars together in time to race Sunday.
They’ll also be racing on the muchloved, five-wide Fontana asphalt that could be gone by the time NASCAR returns next year. Auto Club Speedway’s tentative plans to tear up this seasoned, historic track to turn it into a half-mile short course reflect the sport’s evolution toward a different kind of racing, but drivers like Kyle Larson and Kyle Busch adore Fontana’s character and pure speed.
“I would miss it,” said Larson, the defending Cup champion. “I love this style of track and the way the surface is wore out. But as much as I love these intermediate-style tracks — and we saw it at the Clash — short tracks are what makes this sport, to me, exciting.”
The Next Gen car thrives on shorter tracks because it handles much better and also navigates dirty air more efficiently. The new setup will make racing better on road courses and in tight short-track quarters — and the general consensus is those situations are far more entertaining to fans than more static racing at extreme speeds on NASCAR’s big ovals such as Fontana.
“I’m for more short tracks,” Larson added. “They don’t suit me very well, but I still think, for the betterment of the sport, that we need more of them. I would like to see it. I think it would get a lot of people even more excited about this event.”
The Fontana race is on again after a one-year pause. After Alex Bowman won in 2020, NASCAR didn’t race here last year for the first time since the track opened in 1997 due to the pandemic.
Xfinity: Cole Custer persevered through four late restarts to win a protracted NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Fontana, claiming the title at his home track for the second time. Custer comfortably held off Noah Gragson and Trevor Bayne in triple overtime after the final restart. Custer earned his 10th Xfinity Series victory in his SS-Green Light Racing Ford on the same track where he earned his third in 2019.