Only thing missing for IndyCar’s MAVTV500 was the crowd

Very few were in attendance to see the greatest IndyCar race of all time

Lucille Dust/AR1.com

Saturday's MAVTV 500 was just about everything a race fan could ask for.

Thrills, as in a record 80 lead changes. Chills, every time – and there were many – that the fellas went five-wide at more than 200 mph. And spills, with four major crashes that fortunately ended with no one seriously injured.

But could it have been IndyCar's last stand at Auto Club Speedway?

A great show was witnessed by an embarrassingly small crowd, maybe 10,000 (more like 3,000 to 5,000) and change in the 68,000-seat grandstand and a little more than a handful of RVs in the infield campground.

Track president Dave Allen was afraid of that going in, given that summer in the Inland Empire makes a day at the speedway a very hard sell.

"We need to be fair to the fans," he said. "A June date in the Inland Empire with the heat, we knew it was going to be a challenge. But we didn't have a whole lot of choices."

But should IndyCar offer another date in June, July or August, Auto Club Speedway will turn it down.

"We won't take it," Allen said. "We can't. We're not going to do that to our fans any more. It needs to be either September, October or later in the year, after Labor Day. If it's another summer date, it's not going to work, to be frank."

Understand, this is a jigsaw puzzle with a lot of pieces, and it is a perpetual challenge to find the ones that fit.

Auto Club Speedway's bread-and-butter event is its NASCAR date, which has found a successful home in mid-March and has sold out the last two years, after a long stretch of empty seats. (And NASCAR has a significant stake in that success, given that International Speedway Corp., part of the France family empire, owns the track.)

The IndyCar dates, by comparison, have been a struggle.

When the circuit returned to Fontana in 2012, for the first time in seven years, a mid-September race was the season finale and drew 30,000. The next year, the season finale at Fontana was scheduled for Oct.19 and drew around 20,000. Last year they raced at night on the traditionally sweltering Labor Day weekend and around 18,000 were in the grandstand.

That's a trend, and it ain't good.

"We've had four different race dates the last four years, and we've also had four different start times," Allen said. "So there's no consistency there, and you need consistency."

But this is a particularly challenging jigsaw puzzle because the two entities have different needs.

IndyCar can't come here at the beginning of its season, in late March, because that's right after the NASCAR date. And April is the Long Beach Grand Prix, a 41-year tradition/party that drew 181,000 fans to the streets of Long Beach for three days on the third weekend in April.

Scheduling another Southern California IndyCar event around that time doesn't make much sense. Additionally, IndyCar – unlike NASCAR, which considers the SoCal market critical to its business plan – doesn't need Fontana so much, because Long Beach gives it entrée to the L.A. media market.

And this is the biggest sticking point: IndyCar, which has cut its schedule from 19 to 16 events since 2013, has moved its season finale from October to Labor Day weekend to avoid conflicts with college and pro football.

So unless Allen can convince the series' leaders that the potential of a Fontana date in late September or October is worth re-extending their season, the open-wheel cars might be done here.

"We need to come up with a date that is good for us, good for the league and good for our fans and stick to that," Allen said. "If we can do that, the on-track product we saw today was spectacular. That was one of the best races I've ever seen, period.

"… We've had the season finale here in the past and its come down to last-lap passes. So I can't think of a better place to have the season finale for the series than here. And I think if we can get to a spot where we're comfortable on both sides, that's the best case (scenario) for everybody."

Worst case? A "take it or leave it" ultimatum. But I can see it happening. Jim Alexander/Orange County Register