NASCAR's Auto Club 500 weekend was plauged by rain and that is always hard to deal with in scheduling, but NASCAR's determination to get the race done on the scheduled day was a bit over the top. The Major League Baseball has a rule that they wait a reasonable amount of time and then call off the game. NASCAR has the never give up attitude when it comes to rain delays.

The Auto Club 500 was scheduled to start at 1:00 PM PT and at 11:00 PM they were still trying to get restarted after 87 laps of racing. But, without success to get the track dry, they called the race until Monday morning at 10:00 AM PT.

Should NASCAR revise their rain procedures? Yes, they failed to get the track dry enough for safe competition when they initially dropped the green flag and caused many teams to take the punishment. Denny Hamlin and Casey Mears both wrecked because of the wet track and many others almost wrecked. Plus, when Casey Mears wrecked he took out three other cars including his teammate, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Sam Hornish Jr. and Reed Sorenson.

They probably think they have the fans in mind who came to the track to see the race, but to wait 10 hours before calling the race with short bursts of racing mixed in with hours of delay is not entertaining for the fans at home or in the seats at the track.

When racing at a track such as the one in southern California that is 2 miles long, NASCAR knows it is going to take some time to dry. Then, especially on this occasion, NASCAR knew that the track drying process was going to be tough as they started the race, but the track was weeping through the seams in the pavement from all of the rain during the weekend. When the rain came back at 6:12 PM PT and continued for quite some time, NASCAR should have known that the situation would be worse and should have called the day a wash at that time.

Did they call the race then, no. After hours of waiting for the rain to stop and then track drying that totalled nearly 5 hours, they decided to call the race 10 hours after the scheduled green flag.

The result, is that probably many of the fans left the track to head home when the rain returned and wouldn't stop. The fans that tried to wait at the track for the racing to resume then headed home late at night and will probably have to waste a sick day from work as they won't get home until sometime in the middle of the night.

So, if NASCAR was trying to get the race in to make the fans that came to the track happy, they failed in that objective. Meanwhile, FOX got tired of trying to fill time and just as the rain started again around 6:00 PM PT, they went back to regular programming and came back to check in throughout the night until they called the race. Even they had the sense to bag the event when the rain returned, but NASCAR didn't want to give up.

There's another side of the event that NASCAR should have considered when making the call to bag the race due to rain. This was the first event using the COT at the track and the teams already didn't know what to expect with the cars and stopping and starting the event threw in more unknowns after qualifying and practice sessions were rained out. The teams had limited time on the track before the race to figure out what they wanted to do to prepare their cars. Sure, all the teams had the same limited time on the track and the playing field was even across the board, but still it'd have been different if they had a notebook of information to rely on, but with the new car their old notebooks were mostly useless with the new car.