Ontario Motor Speedway: The Indianapolis of the West

Nothing is here now. But for exactly one decade, this patch of the Inland Empire held one of the most ambitious racing facilities ever built in the United States.

Ontario Motor Speedway opened in August nineteen seventy as the Indianapolis of the West. That was not just a marketing slogan. The oval was two and a half miles long, banked at nine degrees, and laid out to the precise dimensions of Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was the only racing facility in American history designed to accommodate major events from all four dominant sanctioning bodies at once: USAC and IndyCar for open-wheel racing, NASCAR for five-hundred-mile stock car races, NHRA for drag racing, and Formula One on an infield road course.

The first race, the California Five Hundred, was held on September sixth, nineteen seventy, with about one hundred eighty thousand people in the stands. By the standards of any era, that is a staggering opening crowd.

But Ontario never sustained those numbers. The circuit was forty miles from Los Angeles, far enough to be inconvenient, and the surrounding sprawl had not yet grown to meet it. Race attendance slipped. Operating costs did not. The track hosted a series of legendary moments, including Mark Donohue setting a qualifying speed of one hundred eighty-five miles per hour in nineteen seventy-one, and Al Unser Sr. winning multiple California Five Hundreds across the decade. NASCAR ran its season finale here for several years.

In nineteen eighty, Chevron Land Company purchased the property for forty-two million dollars. Demolition came in nineteen eighty-one, costing about four million dollars to tear down what had taken far more to build. The site sat vacant for years before a hotel eventually rose on the fourth turn.

A replacement track, the Auto Club Speedway, opened several miles south in nineteen ninety-seven on the old Kaiser Steel site. It too has since closed.