The Auto Club 500 is going off this weekend at the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, and it doesn’t look like it will be a commercial success.

Not that failing to sell tickets is a new phenomenon here; the last sellout was in 2003, the final year that Fontana had only one Sprint Cup race. Since then, 10 consecutive non-sellouts.

But this Sunday’s race could be the biggest attendance disaster yet.

Numbers floating around, here in the press box, are guestimating Sunday attendance totals under 30,000. It seems clear only a huge walk-up audience can save the race from an embarrassingly small crowd.

Many tickets have been steeply discounted, in the last week, from $55 each to $35.

Still, the crowd looks as if it will be deeply depressed.

The economy is getting much of the blame. NASCAR fandom skews middle-class and even blue-collar, and most people in those economic brackets probably have issues with the idea of handing over even $35 each for a family of, say, four.  Especially when the race will be televised live.

But, then, Fontana has never really seized the imagination of SoCal race fans, either. Not since the first few years, when the return of NASCAR seemed a big deal,  after a decade-plus of not visiting the region.

Since those heady early days, when tickets were dear and Roger Penske even talked about ringing the entire track with grandstands, taking capacity to something like 200,000 (!) … interest has ebbed fairly steadily. The start of a race in semi-nearby Las Vegas (next week, this year) didn’t help. Lots more to do in Las Vegas before and after a race than in, say, Rancho Cucamonga.

It doesn’t help that SoCal fans — for good reason — associate a February race with bad weather. It was nice and sunny today, and tomorrow is supposed to be the same. But there is a chance of rain, on Sunday, and folks who were here a year ago certainly will remember that the race was rained out on Sunday, a few laps short of being official, and finished on Monday. In a near-empty raceway.

Anyway, this place could be as close to a ghost town (come Sunday’s 3 p.m. race), as NASCAR has seen in the past couple of decades. And that, no doubt, will reopen the discussion that Fontana should lose one of its races to a track somewhere in the Southeast. Or, actually, to a track anywhere but here.