Auto Club Speedway’s big unknown: Popular NASCAR track set for 2-mile finale and

Rarely do NASCAR drivers agree on anything, but ask them what they think of Auto Club Speedway and what you’ll hear in response is near universal admiration for the 2-mile track located in Fontana, Calif., just outside Los Angeles. Quite a few will state that it is maybe the best track on the schedule. They will talk glowingly about its wide, multilane, coarse surface that makes it the epitome of a “driver’s track.” Some will describe it as challenging, something lacking at many other tracks.

Much to drivers’ chagrin, however, Sunday’s Cup Series race is scheduled to be the last on a circuit layout that’s earned it widespread praise.

Plans call for NASCAR to transform ACS, which hosted its first Cup race in 1997, into a half-mile short track. That reconfiguration project necessitates ACS being dropped from the NASCAR schedule for at least the 2024 season, and depending on the timeliness of the process, perhaps the 2025 season too.

“I love the racetrack, it’s one of my favorites, and I’m not one to pick favorites,” Martin Truex Jr. said. “I’m going to miss it.”

NASCAR originally announced the project in Sept. 2020 with the goal to complete the project by no later than 2023. The new track was to blend the high banking that’s a trademark at Bristol Motor Speedway with the long straightaways featured at Martinsville Speedway. iRacing was even called on to lend its virtual track expertise to design how ACS would look and race, with NASCAR executive Ben Kennedy, a former NASCAR national series driver, even helping to fine-tune the short-track layout.

But plans to reconfigure ACS were first put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic, then supply-chain issues, soaring costs and other delays. NASCAR competed on the 2-mile track last spring, a race that arguably was one the best in ACS’ history, before announcing that fall the 2023 spring race would be the last before the project moved forward.

Although the Cup schedule currently features only four short tracks (Bristol, Martinsville, Richmond Raceway and North Wilkesboro Speedway) and there’s a common refrain within the industry for more to be added, the decision to continue to flip ACS into short track has been met with derision by drivers and fans alike.

“I wish they would leave it,” Ryan Blaney said. “I think you talk to any driver who is going to come through there and they will tell you the same thing. That place is one of the funnest, coolest racetracks that we go to. … I hate to see that place go. I am sure the half-mile is going to be fun, and it will be different, but that place is so unique, and the drivers have so much fun there, and it puts on great racing.”

Said Chase Briscoe: “I thought that it was just a really well-put-together racetrack for those cars, so I’m bummed. It’s one of my favorite tracks, for sure, to go to just because I feel like that’s one of the tracks where you as a driver can make quite a bit of a…