Clear as Labor Day: Move of race west was wrong

Walking down the long pit lane at Atlanta Motor Speedway late in Sunday's race, as crewmen ferried fuel cans back from the Sunoco pumps and the sound of impact wrenches whirred into the night, it was impossible not to notice that massive, mostly full main grandstand shimmering under the lights. Seeing that crowd, the largest ever for a Labor Day weekend race in the long history of NASCAR, brought one thought to mind.

The people have spoken.

They've spoken loud and clear and with their wallets about where the sport belongs on the last long weekend of summer. According to the official race report, Sunday's crowd at Atlanta was 111,300 -- larger than any of the gatherings that descended upon Auto Club Speedway in Southern California on Labor Day weekend in the past five years, certainly larger than the meager 70,000 the Los Angeles-area track drew last season, and almost twice the grandstand capacity of little Darlington Raceway, which was a Labor Day staple for five decades.

It also was a huge boost for the Atlanta speedway, which hadn't seen a crowd that big in years, and managed to carve a niche for itself even on a weekend with several other big events going on around the city.

"We thought it would be good last year when we announced it, but with what's gone on economically since last August, I don't think I really started to get a sense that it was going to be as good as it is was until four weeks ago," said AMS president Ed Clark, whose facility fell about 12,000 tickets shy of a sellout.

"But we're thrilled. More so than financially, what we're thrilled about was ... the thank-yous. I even had NASCAR officials before the start of the race walking up to me and shaking my hand and saying, 'Hey, thanks for this, this is really cool.' I don't remember ever having anything like that happen. So we're thrilled and very humbled by the results of this event."

So maybe at last Atlanta has found a formula that works, giving the track at least a temporary reprieve from talk of losing one of its dates to Kentucky or Las Vegas. But really, this isn't about Atlanta Motor Speedway. This is about something much bigger than that.

This is about righting a wrong, about restoring balance to the NASCAR universe, about returning the Labor Day weekend event to the one region of the country where people embraced it for half a century. This is about realizing, with five years' worth of hindsight, that shifting the Labor Day race from Darlington to what was then called California Speedway ranks among the worst moves the sport has ever made. (Continued)