Where was this kind of thinking five years ago?

The 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup schedule hasn't been released by the bigwigs at Daytona Beach yet, but there is already buzz that there will be some late season date swapping going on among Atlanta Motor Speedway, Talladega Superspeedway and the Auto Club (formerly California) Speedway.

The logic behind this move that would see Atlanta end up with Auto Club's Labor Day weekend date, Talladega getting Atlanta's late October date and Auto Club getting Talladega's early October date is that it would help attendance at all three venues.

Atlanta and Auto Club have been especially hard hit with attendance woes as of late.

The thought is that if Atlanta and Talladega's dates were further away from each other they would attract the same fans to both races since they are only 200 miles apart.

Auto Club officials have decried the hot California weather as the reason for their sagging attendance since the addition of the second race in 2004, and a move to October would alleviate the weather issues.

Moving Talladega's date to later on the schedule would also boost interest as a restrictor-plate "wild card" in the Chase schedule, coming as the fifth race to the end.

Or so the logic goes.

And it's not a bad idea to schedule races at tracks when they have a chance to be successful.

So, I repeat, where the heck was this thinking five years ago when NASCAR jerked away Rockingham's race dates and limited Darlington to one date?

I know. I know. I have belabored this point to no end, but if the old track had been giving this opportunity you would still see NASCAR races there.

It infuriates me to no end that the folks in California get away with putting on a poor quality race in front of sparse crowds, and NASCAR bends over backwards to help them be successful, when they so jovially pulled up the stakes and left Rockingham.

I know there were other factors involved and Bruton Smith appears to be ready to take advantage of the same circumstances again (more on this in a minute), but the bottom line is that NASCAR is unwilling to admit that its grand experiment in the country's second largest market is an abject failure.

By admitting failure in California, the NASCAR powers-that-be admit that their growth over the last 15 years was, at best, a passing fad, or, at worst, a sham of a numbers game. And if anyone is getting a Labor Day race, why can't it be Darlington?

Weather and too many races in too short a time were the things that hurt Rockingham's attendance when it was on the Cup schedule -- Darlington and Rockingham are only 60 miles apart on the map, and their spring race dates were less than a month apart on the calendar. A shift like this would have done wonders for both of those tracks.

If NASCAR had cared.

On another schedule-related note, it looks like NASCAR is going to find itself in another race date lawsuit with a Bruton Smith-owned race track.

They already have the lawsuit, it's just that now Smith owns the track. Smith's Speedway Motorsports Inc., when it wasn't forcing Humpy Wheeler into retirement last week, found the time to buy the Kentucky Speedway, which is knee-deep in an anti-trust lawsuit against NASCAR right now.

Smith knows this game well. He used it to grab a second date for Texas at Rockingham's expense in 2005. I wouldn't be surprised to see somebody losing a date in the very near future to make this lawsuit go away.

I'm looking at you, New Hampshire.

I wrote that the devil was coming when Smith bought New Hampshire International Speedway last year, and it appears he has an affinity for bluegrass, or at least the bluegrass state.

Andy Cagle can be reached at andycagle@earthlink.net