Auto Club Speedway ran for 26 years before NASCAR pulled the plug on it. In that time, the Fontana track delivered wins, brutal losses, and plenty of agonizing second-place finishes. Sam Mayer had one of the closest of those near-misses in the very last race ever there. That memory has clearly stuck with him.

“I love you, I miss you,” Mayer wrote emotionally on X, saying exactly how he feels about a track that no longer exists as the one he raced on.

NASCAR never just shut Fontana down and chose to walk away. Back in 2023, the company promised a high-banked, half-mile short track to replace the old 2-mile oval, made with the same bite as Bristol. The plan was to demolish first and then rebuild. But while the demolition happened, the rebuild never came.

NASCAR kept roughly 90 acres of the original property, the grandstands, the pit road, and the long front straightaway. The four turns got bulldozed completely. Today, that front straightaway just ends. There are no track-like corners or banking. It’s all dirt piles and weeds where Turn 1 used to begin.

The remaining 433 acres weren’t empty for long. NASCAR sold that land to developers for somewhere between $543 million and $569 million. Massive industrial warehouses are now exactly where Turns 1 and 2 once had cars running at full speed.

Former NASCAR Commissioner Steve Phelps has been honest about why construction stalled. Building the new short track would cost over $300 million, and he has openly questioned whether that is the smartest use of the company’s money right now. West Region President Dave Allen confirmed the project is paused while NASCAR figures out if Fontana is even still the right call.

But for Mayer, there’s a backstory to the way he’s feeling. He finished second in that final 2-mile race in February 2023, driving the No. 1 Chevrolet for JR Motorsports. John Hunter Nemechek beat him to the win that day. At 19 years old, Mayer said afterward that he could “taste that first win”, and he rode that exact momentum into a breakout career.

With the home track gone and its replacement nowhere close to being built, NASCAR had to look elsewhere to keep Southern California on the schedule.

This year, NASCAR made a much bigger swing. The series ran its first-ever race on an active U.S. military base, laying out a temporary 3.4-mile street course across the runways at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. Mayer was part of that weekend, too, and not in a way he will want to remember. On June 20, he clipped a wall and set off a 25-car pileup that brought out a 43-minute red flag.

NASCAR’s looking for a new home

Southern California is NASCAR’s second-largest TV market. That is why, even with Fontana stuck in limbo, the organization refuses to move on from the region entirely.

One of the plans remains the short track itself, still technically alive but parked indefinitely. West Region President Dave Allen has called it “Option No. 1,” while admitting NASCAR is still openly weighing.

There is already a backup floating around. If a developer can offer roughly 300 acres elsewhere in Southern California, like Bakersfield, NASCAR could abandon the Fontana site altogether and start fresh.

But while that decision drags on, NASCAR has looked for other ways to maintain a presence in Southern California. For three years, the Los Angeles Coliseum filled the calendar with a temporary quarter-mile track built inside the football stadium, before the cost of rebuilding it annually caught up. This year, NASCAR swung bigger at San Diego, with numbers strong enough that NASCAR is already eyeing a return in 2027.

None of that, though, changes what is sitting in Fontana right now. Whether NASCAR eventually finds its 300 acres elsewhere or spends the $300 million at the old site, the short track Mayer and so many others were promised still does not exist.