For the past five years, Bianca Vobecky has attended the annual Irwindale Chamber of Commerce silent auction with one goal: put in the winning bid for a season pass to the Toyota Speedway at Irwindale.

She won it three years in a row, lost last year and won again at this year’s event, held last month.

“We usually go to the event just to bid on that. We go to the speedway almost every Saturday,” said Vobecky, 40, president of general contractor and demolition company Vobecky Enterprises Inc. in Glendora. “It was fun, inexpensive and there was something for everyone.”

So Vobecky was disappointed last week when she got an e-mail from the chamber letting her know the speedway, which was home to NASCAR-sanctioned short-track racing, is cancelling this year’s season and shutting down. Officials announced the closure last week after the speedway’s operator filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

“My son had already invited some of his friends,” she lamented.

But it’s not a total loss: That e-mail from the chamber offered to reimburse the $150 Vobecky paid for the season pass.

Failure Is an Option

Most bosses trumpet the success of their employees, but Jeff Stibel celebrates failure.

The 38-year-old chief executive of

Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. encourages his executives, employees and pretty much anyone who visits the company’s Malibu headquarters to grab a Sharpie and write about their biggest blunders on the “failure wall.”

The idea, he said, is simple: “We learn much more from our failures than we do from our successes.”

Stibel said the failure wall started recently when he “got a little paint and one evening with a bottle of wine started writing up some famous failures” on the largest wall in the office. The idea took off, and now the wall is covered with missteps that Stibel hopes will motivate his employees to take risks and not fear failure.

So what is one of his biggest failures? Years ago, as a web entrepreneur, Stibel passed on a chance to sell his company to a startup he hadn’t ever heard of. The startup’s name: Google.

“That was one of the bigger, more embarrassing ones,” he said.

Staff reporters James Rufus Koren and Richard Clough contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].