Speedway Lands Music Festival

The Auto Club Speedway in Fontana will host this year’s HARD Summer Music Festival.

The event is scheduled to take place July 30-31, with rapper Ice Cube headlining the first night and Major Lazer, a U.S group that plays electronic music, topping the bill on closing night, according to a statement released Tuesday by the concert’s organizers.

Last year’s festival, which was held at Fairplex in Pomona, was marred by the deaths of two concertgoers on the event’s first day.

A spokeswoman for the HARD Summer organization declined to comment on whether those deaths, both of which were allegedly drug overdoses, were the reason why the festival was unable to return to Fairplex this year, as has been reported.

Fairplex is owned by Los Angeles County and operated by the Los Angeles County Fair Association. After last year’s festival, the county board of supervisors formed a task force that examined ways to make such gatherings at county-owned facilities safer.

Festival organizers approached speedway officials about hosting this year’s event, said David Talley, spokesman for the raceway.

“For us, it’s another rental event,” Talley said. “We basically say ‘here it is, do what you need to do, if you need any help let us know.’ It’s no different than if we were letting a tire company use [the speedway] for a day.”

“But we think this is a good way to expose young people to our operation and what usually goes on here, even though this isn’t a racing event.”

This will not be Auto Club Speedway’s first musical event. It hosted a concert in 2012 that featured KISS and Blink 182, Talley said.