Ontario Motor Speedway: The Indianapolis of the West
California
The shopping centers and distribution warehouses just off the freeway here give no hint that this ground once held one of the most celebrated racetracks ever built in America. Ontario Motor Speedway opened in August of nineteen seventy on a two and a half mile oval that was deliberately designed as a twin of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, right down to the banked corners, the pit lane configuration, and the infield tunnel. Journalists called it the Indianapolis of the West, and for a decade that was not an exaggeration.
The track's first major event was the California Five Hundred, an Indy-car race held on September sixth, nineteen seventy, won by Jim McElreath. Within months it also hosted NASCAR's season finale, NHRA drag races on its quarter-mile strip, and a Formula One exhibition event called the Questor Grand Prix. At its peak Ontario was staging several of the biggest events in American motorsport within a single calendar year, drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands.
But the finances never matched the ambitions. The track operated on borrowed money throughout the nineteen seventies, barely making minimum payments on its bonds. Attendance was strong but not strong enough to cover the enormous carrying costs of a facility that size. Then in nineteen seventy-nine a far more powerful force intervened: California real estate. Chevron Land Company, already a major stakeholder via unpaid obligations to the track, purchased the speedway outright in nineteen eighty for about forty two million dollars, covering back taxes, overdue interest, and the bonds still owed to bondholders.
The speedway closed in December of nineteen eighty. Demolition began in May of nineteen eighty-one and ran into early nineteen eighty-two, at a cost of around four million dollars. The land became an industrial park and shopping development. Not a single piece of the original grandstands remains, and there is no marker on the site acknowledging what once stood here. Ontario Motor Speedway is one of those American landmarks that simply vanished.
