If NASCAR officials had known what lay in store for them at Auto Club Speedway of Southern California last week, they never would have allowed transporters to cross the Mississippi River.
All that was missing from the weekend was the plague of locusts, and the last time it rained like this in California, Noah built himself a boat.
Weather is the one thing that racers can’t control…although there have been (tongue-in-cheek) rumors that the France family has a direct hotline to make sure it cooperates when necessary. Apparently it was on the blink on Sunday, because it was one of those miserable weekends one associates with Dover or Pocono or Michigan, dead in the middle of summer thunderstorm season.
With all the momentum from a pretty exciting Daytona 500, it could have been a huge weekend for NASCAR, but the rain took what momentum there was and put it back on the shelf.
Even a Scotsman was chilled by the unseasonable deluge.
“It’s bloody freezing,” said Dario Franchitti. “It’s California and I’m freezing. We’ve been fighting this weather all week and now I’m going to go find myself someplace warm to hang out.”
The race was suspended after 87 laps when rain again coated the speedway, but it had been anything but a smooth ride up to that point. The race finally got started about four hours late, Michael Waltrip’s crew forgot to tighten an oil line and hosed down the two-mile oval, necessitating a long cleanup.
Denny Hamlin slipped on a weeper and smacked the wall 11 laps in, and 10 laps after that, all hell broke loose when Casey Mears tripped on more water and collected Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Reed Sorenson and the unfortunate Sam Hornish, Jr.
After that wreck, which delayed things another hour, Earnhardt was critical of the decision to race. “We shouldn’t be racing on this track, dirty as it is,” he said. The wind, which was blowing hard out of the west, stirred up the detritus associated with any race track — wrappers, tear-offs, cups, etc. — and that caused overheating problems all over the place.
Funny thing about the new car, when it gets hot and starts spitting steam, the overflow hose puffs like a Lionel train. I digress.
NASCAR, as it always is when faced with weather delays, was balancing on the point of a knife. Make every effort to get the race in is the NASCAR mantra, and they pushed it past 2 a.m. E.T. before making the call to postpone until later Monday afternoon.
Yet, the weeper problem was visible on TV, and it cost Hamlin, Mears, Earnhardt, Jr. and Sorenson wrecked race cars. To its credit, NASCAR came up with a creative solution by cutting grooves in the affected areas to give the water someplace to go, and that seemed to make it work a lot better.
But it was all for naught, as more rain gave the lie to the old ’60s song which stated that it never rains in Southern California.
It is sort of fitting that most of the teams were glad to get out of Florida after Speedweeks, only to spend what seemed like two more weeks in La-La-Land.
California Speedway is a showplace, sure, but it’s a showplace that has trouble filling the stands on a regular basis. This weather, the postponement of the two biggest races of the weekend to an off-day...it certainly doesn’t help things from a bottom-line perspective.
One thing is for sure: when NASCAR’s traveling circus reaches Las Vegas later this week, it might be cold, but it probably won’t rain. Wonder what kind of action you can get on that?