Since Rusty Wallace’s championship-winning days, NASCAR has undergone significant changes to its track lineup. There has been particularly heavy experimentation with street circuits, new venues, and expanding into new markets. Some of those changes have come at the expense of iconic racetracks, even as many of the new additions have helped NASCAR reach new audiences. Looking back, Wallace admitted there are moments he never imagined he would witness.

“I never thought we would run the streets to Chicago,” said Wallace in a press conference at the North Wilkesboro Speedway. “I never thought we’d run this on a naval base. I never thought we’d do that. There’s a lot of things that happened that I never thought would ever happen. I never thought in a million years that California Speedway would get torn down, and there it is. What’s going to happen, I don’t know. But everything’s still moving.”

Wallace saw NASCAR grow from a regional series into a national powerhouse. He pointed to two of the most monumental moments in the sport’s recent history when it comes to its race schedule. Chicago hosted NASCAR’s first-ever street race in 2023, something that would have been almost unimaginable during the late 1980s and early 1990s. And as if that wasn’t enough, the series raced around an active military base in California this year to celebrate the U.S. Navy’s 250th anniversary, making for a grand spectacle.

That said, there have been challenging sacrifices associated with that progress. Nothing, in Wallace’s opinion, better represents that than California Speedway’s demise. The 2-mile D-shaped oval, which Roger Penske constructed in 1997 on the site of a former steel mill in Fontana, swiftly rose to prominence as one of NASCAR’s top facilities.

Renamed Auto Club Speedway in 2008, it hosted both NASCAR and IndyCar races and even produced the closed-circuit world speed record of more than 241 mph in 2000. Before holding its last race in 2023, the track continued to be a regular on the Cup Series schedule.

Many devoted followers were taken aback by what came next. As NASCAR pursued plans to replace it with a modern half-mile short track, the famous oval was dismantled. But the redevelopment never went as planned. Of the initial 522 acres, 433 had been sold for an industrial park and warehouses by 2025. As a result, only the parcel meant for the new circuit was within NASCAR’s control. The proposal was therefore formally put on hold, as NASCAR commissioner Steve Phelps admitted in April 2025.

Rising construction costs, economic pressures, and shifting priorities forced the organization to pause the rebuild indefinitely. The remaining land is now mostly overgrown and deserted. Whether the proposed short track will ever become a reality remains unclear.

Wallace, however, has a positive outlook on the bigger picture. He believes NASCAR has shown a remarkable ability to reinvent itself, even as iconic venues like Fontana have disappeared and the schedule continues to evolve. The passion surrounding the sport Wallace loves remains very much the same.