Riverside International Raceway: California's Lost Road Course
In September 1957 a brand-new road course opened in the dry, wind-scoured hills of Edgemont, California, roughly sixty miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Over the following three decades Riverside International Raceway staged a Formula 1 Grand Prix, a quarter century of NASCAR road racing, the thunder of Can-Am, long-distance sports car classics and the very first IROC showdowns. Then, in the summer of 1989, the gates closed for good. Today a shopping mall and business parks cover the ground where the esses once snaked through the scrub, and Riverside has become the definitive American example of a great circuit lost to real estate.
Born in the postwar racing boom
Southern California in the mid-1950s was the beating heart of American motorsport enthusiasm. Returning servicemen had brought home a taste for European sports cars, the hot rod scene was exploding, and makeshift races on airport runways and public roads were drawing crowds that those venues could no longer safely hold. What the region lacked was a permanent, purpose-built road course. Riverside answered that need. Carved into cheap ranch land in the Edgemont area near the city of Riverside, the track opened in September 1957 and quickly attracted the biggest names in West Coast road racing. The location was unglamorous — hot, dusty and often swept by desert winds — but the land was affordable and the layout was genuinely challenging. When the Los Angeles Times began sponsoring a major sports car race there in 1958, the Times Grand Prix, the circuit gained a marquee event and metropolitan press coverage that few American road courses could match. Under the long stewardship of Les Richter, a former Los Angeles Rams linebacker turned racing executive, Riverside grew into one of the most professionally run circuits in the country.
Nine turns and a mile of wide-open throttle
Riverside's layout was a study in contrasts. In its longest form the lap measured roughly 3.3 miles, while NASCAR generally used a shorter variant of about 2.6 miles that bypassed part of the twisty opening section. The first half of the lap was all rhythm: after the opening corner the road climbed and dropped through a famous sequence of esses, a flowing chain of bends where a mistake in one corner compounded through the next three. Then came the counterpoint — a back straight stretching more than a mile, one of the longest in American racing, where Can-Am sports cars and big-block stock cars alike reached staggering speeds before hammering the brakes for Turn 9, a broad, slightly banked right-hander that swept the cars back onto the front straight. The surroundings were as unforgiving as the layout. Runoff areas were mostly hard-packed dirt and scrub, the summer heat punished engines and tires, and the ever-present dust worked its way into everything. Drivers respected Riverside; many openly feared parts of it.
The day Formula 1 came to Riverside
For one November weekend in 1960, Riverside stood at the center of the racing world. The United States Grand Prix, the final round of the Formula 1 season, was run on the California course, and Stirling Moss won it in a privately entered Lotus run by the Rob Walker team. It should have been a triumph for American road racing, but the world championship had already been decided in Jack Brabham's favor months earlier, the promotion struggled, and the crowd fell far short of expectations. The race lost money, and Formula 1 never returned to Riverside; from 1961 the United States Grand Prix found a long-term home at Watkins Glen in New York. Even so, the 1960 race left Riverside with a distinction few American tracks can claim: a genuine round of the Formula 1 world championship, won by one of the greatest drivers who ever lived, on a circuit that no longer exists.
NASCAR's West Coast home
If Formula 1 was a one-off, NASCAR became part of Riverside's identity. Stock cars first raced there in the late 1950s, and from 1963 the Motor Trend 500 made the track a fixture on the Grand National calendar. The race quickly became the property of Dan Gurney, the Californian all-rounder who won it five times during the 1960s and earned the unofficial title of king of Riverside. Road courses were alien territory for most stock car regulars of the era, which made Riverside a happy hunting ground for road racing specialists who entered as one-off ringers. For many seasons the NASCAR calendar actually opened at Riverside in January, meaning the champions of the sport began their title campaigns not on a Southern oval but on a Californian road course, weeks before the Daytona 500. In later years the track held two Cup dates annually. The final Cup race at Riverside, the Budweiser 400 of June 1988, was won by Rusty Wallace — a road course ace closing out three decades of stock car history in the desert.
Can-Am, endurance racing and the first IROC
Riverside's sports car pedigree ran just as deep. The Times Grand Prix, launched in 1958, grew into one of the richest and best-attended road races in America, drawing international stars across the Atlantic every autumn. When the Can-Am championship arrived in 1966, Riverside became a natural fixture, its endless back straight a perfect stage for the most powerful road racing cars ever built. In the 1970s and 1980s the IMSA endurance championship brought long-distance racing to the circuit, and Indy cars appeared as well, contesting the Rex Mays 300 in the late 1960s and returning in the early 1980s. Riverside also hosted a genuine piece of motorsport innovation: the very first races of the International Race of Champions in the autumn of 1973, in which stars from different disciplines fought each other in identically prepared Porsches. Few circuits anywhere in the world could claim such range — Formula 1, NASCAR, Can-Am, IMSA, Indy cars and IROC all raced on the same piece of California asphalt.
The price of speed
Riverside's history also carries a dark thread, as the safety standards of the era met a fast, hard-edged desert track. In January 1964 Joe Weatherly, NASCAR's reigning two-time champion, died from injuries suffered when his car struck the wall at Turn 6 during the Motor Trend 500 — a tragedy that helped push the sport toward better driver restraints and window nets. In August 1966 Ken Miles, fresh from his heroics for Ford at Le Mans and Daytona, was killed at Riverside while testing the experimental Ford J-car, a loss that stunned the sports car world. And in 1983 the German veteran Rolf Stommelen died after a crash in an IMSA endurance race at the track. Each of these accidents belongs to a wider story about how motorsport slowly, painfully learned to protect its drivers, but together they explain why Riverside was spoken of with respect bordering on wariness even by the bravest of its era.
Sold, closed and paved over
What finally killed Riverside was not danger but geography. The empty desert that had made the land cheap in the 1950s had become prime real estate by the 1980s, as the Inland Empire boomed and the surrounding community incorporated as the city of Moreno Valley. Housing tracts crept toward the fences, land values soared, and the mathematics became irresistible: the property was worth vastly more as a development site than as a racetrack. The final NASCAR Cup race ran in June 1988, the last events wound down the following season, and in the summer of 1989 the circuit closed forever. Within a few years the Moreno Valley Mall and surrounding commercial development had risen over the old racing surface. Today virtually nothing of the track remains on the ground — no grandstands, no asphalt, only memories, photographs and the testimony of those who raced there. Riverside has become shorthand for a whole category of loss: the great American circuits erased by urban growth.
Explore on the map
Riverside may be gone, but the world it belonged to is still out there. Our interactive map charts thousands of motorsport venues across the globe — living circuits, speedways and road courses, including many historic sites in California and the American West. Zoom in on the Los Angeles basin, trace the tracks that survived, and see for yourself how the landscape that once contained Riverside International Raceway has changed.