Ontario Motor Speedway: The Rise and Fall of California's Superspeedway
On a stretch of open land east of Los Angeles, a racetrack opened in 1970 that was meant to outshine every speedway in America. Ontario Motor Speedway in Ontario, California, cost roughly 25 million dollars, borrowed its layout almost line for line from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and drew crowds numbering well over one hundred thousand in its first season. Barely a decade later the wrecking crews moved in. Today people push shopping carts across ground where A. J. Foyt, Mario Andretti and Dale Earnhardt once raced. This is the story of the most ambitious racetrack America ever threw away.
Built to outdo Indianapolis
The project was conceived in the late 1960s, at a moment when American motorsport was booming and Southern California was its commercial heartland. The region already had road courses and short ovals, but nothing that could stage a race on the scale of the Indianapolis 500. The promoters behind Ontario Motor Speedway decided not merely to match the famous Brickyard but to surpass it. The oval they built was, like Indianapolis, two and a half miles around, with four distinct corners joined by long straights, so that cars and setups developed for Indiana would work in California too. Around that familiar shape they wrapped facilities that were far beyond anything American racing had seen: vast grandstands, modern garages and hospitality areas, and an electronic timing and scoring system that was considered state of the art for its era. The venue was financed largely through bonds, a decision that would come to define its fate as much as any race ever run there. When it opened in 1970, newspapers and broadcasters quickly reached for the nickname that stuck: the Indianapolis of the West.
One venue, three racetracks
What made Ontario genuinely unusual was that it was not just an oval. The complex was designed from the start as a multi-discipline motorsport centre. Inside the giant tri-oval footprint lay an infield road course that could be combined with sections of the oval for sports car and formula racing. Alongside it ran a purpose-built drag strip, which meant the National Hot Rod Association could bring its biggest professional categories to the same address where champ cars and stock cars raced. Few circuits anywhere in the world could host top-level oval racing, road racing and drag racing without rebuilding anything in between. That flexibility was part of the sales pitch to investors: the facility was supposed to earn money nearly every weekend of the year, not just on two or three big race days. In practice, filling the calendar proved much harder than filling the brochure, but purely as a piece of engineering the three-tracks-in-one concept was decades ahead of its time and anticipated the multi-configuration speedway complexes that came much later.
The California 500
The crown jewel of the schedule was the California 500, a 500-mile championship race for the same cars and stars that contested the Indianapolis 500. The inaugural edition in 1970 drew an enormous crowd and instantly established the race as one of the biggest events in American open-wheel racing. Through the 1970s the California 500 formed part of an informal triple crown of 500-mile races alongside Indianapolis and Pocono, and winning all three in a single season became one of the sport's rarest achievements. For drivers, Ontario was both familiar and deceptive: the dimensions echoed Indianapolis, but the surface, the weather and the way the wind swept across the flat Inland Empire plain gave the track a character of its own. The race brought the biggest names of the era to Southern California every year, and for a while it looked as if the state had permanently claimed a place at the top table of American racing.
Stock cars, dragsters and a curious Grand Prix
Ontario's calendar reached far beyond open-wheel machinery. NASCAR brought its premier stock car series to the big oval during the 1970s, giving the West Coast one of its rare dates on a schedule dominated by the Southeast. The drag strip hosted major NHRA meetings that attracted the sport's leading professional teams. And in 1971 the track staged one of the oddest and most fascinating events of the decade: the Questor Grand Prix, an exhibition on the road course that pitted current Formula 1 cars against America's Formula 5000 machines. Mario Andretti won it driving a Ferrari, beating a field that mixed grand prix regulars with domestic road racing stars. The event was never repeated, but it remains a footnote beloved by historians, because it was one of the very few occasions when contemporary Formula 1 machinery raced competitively on American soil outside a championship Grand Prix. Ontario, briefly, was the one venue where practically every branch of the sport converged.
California Jam: when the speedway became a stage
The track's most famous single day arguably had nothing to do with racing. In April 1974 the speedway hosted California Jam, one of the largest rock festivals ever staged in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of fans filled the infield to watch a bill that included Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, with the performances broadcast to a national television audience. The event was so successful that a sequel, California Jam II, followed in 1978. For the speedway's operators, the festivals were proof of the site's versatility and a welcome source of income; for the wider public, they turned Ontario into a landmark of 1970s popular culture. It says something about the scale of the place that a crowd which would overwhelm almost any other venue could be absorbed by Ontario's grandstands and infield with room to spare.
The arithmetic that doomed a giant
For all its glamour, Ontario Motor Speedway was drowning in numbers almost from the day it opened. The bond financing left the operating company with heavy annual obligations, and after the novelty of the opening seasons faded, attendance at many events fell short of what the business plan required. Property taxes on such an enormous parcel of land were substantial, and the surrounding area was changing fast: the Inland Empire was filling with warehouses, housing and commerce, and land near the freeways was becoming far more valuable for development than for a use that generated big revenue only a handful of days each year. Ownership and management changed hands as successive groups tried to make the sums work. None of them could. The problem was never the racing, which remained of the highest calibre; it was that the track's own success in choosing a well-connected location ultimately priced motorsport off the land.
The last lap and the wrecking ball
The end came quickly. The 1980 season was the speedway's last, and its final major stock car race that November carried genuine historical weight: it was there that a young Dale Earnhardt clinched his first NASCAR Cup championship, the opening chapter of one of the sport's greatest careers. Soon afterwards the property was sold to developers, and in 1981 demolition crews levelled the grandstands, garages and track surface. Nothing of the circuit survives above ground today. The land where the California 500 was decided now holds shopping centres, hotels, offices and an arena, woven into the fabric of the city of Ontario. When big-time oval racing returned to the region in 1997 with the opening of a new superspeedway in nearby Fontana, it was widely seen as the spiritual heir of Ontario, and that track, in turn, has since faced its own reckoning with the value of Southern California land.
Explore on the map
Ontario Motor Speedway may be gone, but its story is part of a much larger landscape of circuits past and present across California and the world. You can trace where the great superspeedway once stood, find its successor in Fontana and discover hundreds of other venues on our interactive map. Zoom into the Inland Empire, follow the freeways east of Los Angeles, and see how much motorsport history is hidden in plain sight.