It's hard to hide the empty seats

             Mountains have moved to make NASCAR work in Southern California. They still move.

            You'd think there might be seismic activity or something.

            Since 2004, Auto Club Speedway - it was California Speedway until 2008 - has hosted two Sprint Cup races each year. Ever since, it's like the same crowd that once came for one race is divided between two. In the past two years, empty seats have been showing up at many tracks, but Fontana, Calif., is clearly the empty-seat capital of NASCAR.

            Other tracks satisfy the need for speed. Fontana celebrates the need for room. Have you ever been wedged into your seats at a packed house, fumbling around with a cooler between your legs and an assortment of headphones, binoculars, stopwatches and scanners under the seat? No such problem exists in Fontana.

            The inability to attract 92,000 fans to fill the seats of Auto Club Speedway has been vexing to officials of NASCAR and International Speedway Corporation. No more effective lobbyist has as much effect on NASCAR decision-making as the track president, Gillian Zucker.

            Thus far, Speedway Motorsports Inc.'s Bruton Smith has been unable to secure either a second date for his track in Las Vegas, Nev., or a single date for his track in Sparta, Ky.

            Ms. Zucker snapped her fingers and got a second date in 2004. She ousted Darlington Raceway from Labor Day weekend. Since that supposedly premium date hasn't improved attendance, now Ms. Zucker has traded up to a spot in the Chase, thus relinquishing Labor Day to another attendance-challenged track, Atlanta.

            One can't help but wonder what North Carolina Speedway could've done with that kind of sympathetic scheduling back when Rockingham fought the frigid aftermath of Daytona in February and the gales of November. This is the Rock's old date, but the weather is much more reliable in SoCal.

            Auto Club Speedway caught another break when it was allowed to hold Camping World Truck and Nationwide series races as a doubleheader. Usually tripleheader weekends involve trucks on Friday, Nationwide on Saturday and Cup on Sunday. The two-for-one promotion apparently wasn't a notable success. On TV, it looked like the Saturday crowd at the two-mile track numbered well into the thousands.

            Maybe's today's crowd will be better. Maybe they'll round up some cardboard cutouts to place in the empty seats. Maybe they'll line up some Boy Scouts. It's hard to let high-school teams in for free because very few high schools have an auto-racing varsity. It's hard to toss around too many freebies when the loyal folks are paying a hundred bucks a pop.

            NASCAR, like Randy Newman, "loves L.A." The romance has been unrequited.