Rain puts damper on Fontana race

Intermittent rain forced NASCAR to postpone the Auto Club 500 after only 87 laps Sunday night, with Jimmie Johnson leading, despite hours spent trying to dry the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana.

The 250-lap race, the second on the Sprint Cup Series schedule, is set to resume at 10 a.m. today.

The Stater Bros. 300, a race in NASCAR’s second-tier Nationwide Series, is scheduled to be held after the end of the Cup race. The Nationwide race originally was scheduled for Saturday.

Fans with a ticket to either the Saturday or Sunday races will be admitted free today for general admission grandstand seats, speedway officials said.

Other front-runners behind Johnson included his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jeff Gordon, Kyle Busch of Joe Gibbs Racing, Greg Biffle of Roush Fenway Racing and Travis Kvapil of the Yates Racing team.

Only a few thousand of the track’s 92,000 seats were still filled with hardy fans when the race was called off, after a day and night when the wet weather made for an exercise in frustration.

After steady rain Saturday night and Sunday morning, NASCAR finally waved the green flag to start the race at 3:32 p.m. That was 2 hours 32 minutes after the race’s scheduled start -- or at least two hours too early, depending on whom you asked.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Casey Mears -- two other Hendrick drivers -- and Denny Hamlin of Joe Gibbs Racing were promptly involved in early crashes that they and other drivers blamed on a track that they believed wasn’t ready for racing.

Specifically, they complained about losing control of their cars when they ran over “weepers,” tiny streams of groundwater that continued seeping through the asphalt even after crews spent hours drying the two-mile oval.

“I think there are 42 other drivers that would agree we should not be racing on that racetrack right now,” Hamlin said after his wreck. “I hit a wet spot, and I’m not going to be the last one.”

He was right. Only three laps after the caution period for Hamlin’s spin, Mears appeared to drive over a weeper, spun and hit the wall, and then was slammed hard by Earnhardt.

Their collision also caused cars behind them to crash, including Sam Hornish Jr., whose out-of-control Dodge then hit Mears so hard from behind that he flipped Mears’ Chevy over on its roof. Hornish’s engine also caught fire, but it was quickly extinguished by safety crews.

None of the drivers was hurt, but a frustrated Earnhardt said the speedway was “really dirty. The track ain’t ready.”

That accident prompted NASCAR to stop the race under a red flag -- for 1 hour 7 minutes -- until speedway crews could further dry the track.

On the banked corners, some crews used power saws to cut new vertical grooves in the asphalt to help drain the water.

When the race resumed, Johnson, Gordon and the others reached only Lap 87 when another wave of showers stopped the proceedings at 6:11 p.m. That was well short of the 125-lap halfway point that would have made the race official.

The storm was brief, however, and NASCAR opted to spend the next four hours drying the track again in hopes of getting the race completed so that the series could pack up and move to its next event at Las Vegas Motor Speedway this coming weekend.

But NASCAR announced about 11 p.m. that it would wait until today, saying the humidity prevented the track from being dried sufficiently.

“Mother Nature is our worst enemy right now,” said Tony Stewart of the Gibbs team, who was running 15th after 87 laps.

“I feel bad for everyone sitting in the grandstands,” he said. “They’re cold, wet and they’re tougher than we are because they’ve toughed it out all day.”

But the conditions didn’t bother Johnson, the reigning Cup champion, or his cheering section on pit road that included actor Tom Cruise, who chose NASCAR over the Academy Awards on Sunday night. (Cruise played a stock-car driver in the 1990 movie “Days of Thunder.”)

Matt Kenseth, who has won the race the last two years in a Ford prepared by Roush Fenway, was running 14th.

Ryan Newman of Penske Racing, who won last week’s season-opening Daytona 500, was 10th.

Busch also had a strong car. The 22-year-old driver, who won the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race in Fontana on Saturday, had charged to third after starting 22nd.

But Gordon’s No. 24 Chevrolet appeared to be the class of the field in the first 87 laps, even though he was sixth when the rain stopped the race.

“It’s about one of the best cars I’ve ever had,” the four-time Cup champion said during the second rain delay. “It is going to be an interesting race once we get it going.”

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james.peltz@latimes.com