The news has been brewing for a few days and while we have read lots of reports that state the drag strip in Fontana which was shuttered due to noise complaints some two years ago may reopen, we’re here to tell you that it WILL reopen. How can we be so certain? We’re comfortable in saying what we did because we read the following on the track’s website:

Thanks to the Auto Club of Southern California, SEMA and NHRA your Dragway is back!  Stay tuned for the 2014 Auto Club Dragway schedule.

This is fantastic news for fans of quarter mile drag racing in the greater Los Angeles area. The only venue currently available for quarter mile racers in the Southern California area is Famoso Raceway in Bakersfield. The place rules but it is a tough haul from LA. The Irwindale eighth  mile track is very popular but as we have been reporting, that place is under its own potential threat from a new property owner that may not renew the lease on the track after December 2014. But like every one of these announcements, there’s a bit of a twist. If you remember, Fontana was closed because of noise complaints from dickish neighbors (one guy in particular) so the only way to get the track open was to find a way to mitigate the noise that was produced there. Efforts to run only muffled cars and other relatively quiet machinery were not sufficient for the complaining group and ultimately a court order essentially closed the place because it could not be operated without breaking some draconian sound regs.

We have spoken to Mike Rice who is the NHRA Division 7 director about the Fontana situation and he let us know how he believed that things are going to go down. Basically, a huge sound wall is going to be built to keep the noise away from the “sensitive” areas. The only weird thing is that the wall has been engineered, approved, and scienced out by experts in the field but that’s not a guarantee that it is going to work as everyone believes the first time. So…the track will reopen with the sound wall and then sound testing will be completed with the wall in place and cars running down the track to see if the math calculations pan out to real world results. If not, the track may close for a short period so the wall can be changed to work properly. The end result is that the place will be open and running quarter mile drag races once the wall is “perfected” and the regulations are met.

We’re not sure who is involved in funding the wall’s construction or at least helping to offset the cost of the sound wall, which has to be a pretty penny as it is more than a 1/4 mile long and conceivably pretty flipping tall. The track is working on putting its 2014 schedule tomorrow and we’re going to work the phones to see when a potential opening day will be. If we can dig it out of them or they publish it, we’ll keep you posted. Hopefully it falls on a day when Chad is in town, it would be cool to have him there when the place goes back into the racing business!

STAY TUNED…THIS SEEMS LIKE A DRAG STRIP STORY WITH A HAPPY ENDING!