Right off NASCAR's own website...

This is it: No more excuses for Auto Club Speedway

Let's get this straight right away: NASCAR very much needs to race in Southern California, a place where the series has had a presence, off and on, since Marshall Teague's victory at half-mile Carrell Speedway in 1951.

The region is steeped in car culture, complete with iconic images of surfboard-laden Woodie station wagons, cruising El Caminos, street-racing imports and Ronny and the Daytonas' Little GTO. It's where virtually all automobile manufacturers base their design studios. It's a market of 17 million people, the largest the Sprint Cup tour competes in, where the freeways are always jammed and the car is less a mere conveyance and more a way of life.

So enough about what happened to Darlington or Rockingham or North Wilkesboro, enough of the bitterness over the bungled attempt to move the Labor Day weekend date out west, enough blaming Auto Club Speedway of Southern California for things that were completely beyond its control.

Funny, nobody seemed to complain much about NASCAR in Southern California when Parnelli Jones was winning at Ascot Park, or Marvin Panch was winning at Willow Springs, or A.J. Foyt was winning at Ontario, or Rusty Wallace was winning at Riverside. There was none of this square-peg-into-round-hole thinking then. When it comes to NASCAR in greater Los Angeles, the kind of antipathy on display today is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Yes, NASCAR needs to be at Auto Club Speedway, where the sport's top series races on Sunday. Despite all the anger over the closure of some more traditional Southern speedways, despite all the lingering resentment over NASCAR's national push, racing in Southern California is an absolute no-brainer. There are just too many people in the region, too many cars packing the highways, too many lingering memories of the 88 previous premier-level events in the area for NASCAR to simply give up on the big track with the palm trees lining the backstretch.

But does it have to race there twice a year? Given the track's glaring shortcomings in the area of attendance, given that the place sold out for seven consecutive years before it was awarded a second annual date and its grandstand capacity was expanded to its current 92,000, you have to wonder if this would be one of those facilities better off with one date than two.

Sure, every track wants two races. Not all tracks can handle them. Look at Darlington Raceway, which struggled so mightily under the weight of two annual races that people thought the place was on the verge of being shut down. Now it has one race, and it's selling out. Sure, Darlington seats 30,000 fewer people than California. But actual attendance at the two tracks in recent years has been running neck-and-neck.

This weekend's event, California's first in the Chase, is supposed to change all that. Giving up the Labor Day weekend date for Atlanta's old spot in the 10-race playoff is supposed to solve a lot of problems -- give fans a break from the unrelenting heat that often accompanied the old August weekend, remove the lure of a holiday that may tempt people to go out of town, provide potential fans with a more compelling reason to buy tickets and come watch the race.

In theory, it all sounds good. Finally, Auto Club Speedway has everything it's ever wanted. The forecast for Sunday is 75 degrees with a zero chance of precipitation, perfect racing weather. The midway and retail store and Wolfgang Puck restaurant are all ready and waiting. Now it just boils down to a simple question.

Will they show up? For the speedway's sake, you certainly hope so. No question, this is a place where parent company International Speedway Corp. grossly overestimated the market demand, and president Gillian Zucker and her staff have been paying for it. But it's also a track that's rapidly running out of excuses.

A second annual race, a prime-time East Coast start on a summer holiday weekend, dozens upon dozens of amenities, now a Chase event at a more pleasant time of year -- California has tried it all, and to this point it's still struggled to carve those much-needed niches both in the Southern California sports market and the mind of the traditional NASCAR fan. If a Chase race in better weather doesn't jumpstart this speedway, then what is it going to take?

Maybe 23-degree corner banking, according to a report last week in the Los Angeles Times. Evidently the track has at last come to grips with its reputation as a venue for rather mundane competition, something most race fans figured out years ago, and has approached ISC about a $30 million project to raise the banking in its 14-degree corners.

It's not unheard of; the race track company did something similar years ago at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and the result was a much more compelling venue. But there wasn't a recession going on then. Given the fact that ISC's third-quarter profits were down 89 percent -- from $38.8 million to $4.4 million, according to The Wall Street Journal -- such an expensive renovation seems a fantastical prospect.

Ultimately the request sounds a little desperate, especially given that the track's first Chase race hasn't even happened yet. It makes you wonder if the brass at California are seeing the ticket returns, and trying to prepare a tactical next step. And then came a broadside from one of the track's favorite sons, Golden State native and three-time California race winner Jeff Gordon, who pointed out that the region hasn't even been able to support an NFL franchise, and sounded like any attempt to goose interest would be an exercise in futility.

"I don't think you can do anything. Maybe make it into a Bristol, or something like that," Gordon said last week at Kansas. "But beyond that, I don't think you're going to do anything that's going to change the interest level out there. There are just so many options and things to do. I think it's a great track. Is it our most exciting one? Maybe not our most exciting one. But I still think it's a great track, a great facility. If they're not packing the stands, that's not it. It's something else."

Hey, maybe the Chase race will make a difference anyway. Maybe fans will be spurred to come out by the tight points race, or the sight of favorites like Mark Martin and Tony Stewart near the top of the standings. Maybe the date change will help California draw its best crowd in years, just as it did for Atlanta a month ago, and the pressure on the track will ease a little bit.

That's the best-case scenario. But if that doesn't happen, and it's another Sunday dominated by empty seats? Who knows what happens next. Who knows what NASCAR and ISC can do. Because for Auto Club Speedway, there are no more excuses.