CART Not on Fontana Schedule

The addition of a second Winston Cup race to California Speedway’s schedule for 2004 may mean the end of a long relationship with CART.

When Bill Miller, speedway president, made official Friday the fact that NASCAR would hold Labor Day weekend races next year, featuring the Pop Secret 500 on Sunday night, Sept. 5, the ticket package announcement had no mention of CART.

The race will be the first scheduled to begin in prime time in the Eastern time zone. It will be televised by NBC. No starting time was announced, but it is expected to be around 5 p.m. PDT. The other NASCAR weekend at Fontana will feature the Auto Club 500 on May 2.

Season packages include one for only the two NASCAR events, including Busch Series and Winston West races as well as Winston Cup, and another that includes both NASCAR weekends, the AMA superbike weekend, Grand American sports car event, Historic Sports Car Festival and the Indy Racing League race.

Everything, in other words, except CART.

When the Fontana facility opened seven years ago, the CART race was the No. 1 event on the schedule. It sold out what was then the capacity of 71,000 for the opening day, but attendance has fallen in recent years.

Winston Cup, on the other hand, has sold out each year, even with the seating capacity now at 92,000, plus an additional 15,000 to 20,000 who cram into the infield.

“We want to lay the foundation for years to come, not just in 2004, and with CART officials talking about scheduling more road and street races, and more races overseas, it would be difficult to make plans with them included,” Miller said.

Both the IRL and CART have races on this year’s Fontana schedule, the Toyota Indy 400 in September and the CART champ car race in November. CART is in the fourth year of a five-year contract.

Friday’s announcement was made jointly in a telephone hookup with Darlington Raceway, whose schedule was affected by the California race, and Michigan International Speedway, where NASCAR officials were preparing for a race on Sunday.

“People from Day 1 in 1994, when we started making a race track out of an abandoned steel mill, have been asking us when we were going to get a second NASCAR date,” Miller said. “And now I can tell them. It also revives an old tradition from Riverside where two Winston Cup races were held each year from 1970 to 1987.”

Darlington, where the Southern 500 has been run each Labor Day weekend since 1950, will move its race to Nov. 14, 2004, taking over North Carolina Speedway’s date.

This will leave the aging track at Rockingham, N.C., with only one spring race on the 36-race Winston Cup schedule.

NASCAR President Mike Helton said this move to California for a second date is only the first phase in the organization’s “Realignment in 2004 and Beyond,” but would not say what other changes were in the works.