Buried under a shopping complex, California's spectacular cathedral to speed

Hollywood, never slow to gravitate towards glamour, duly obliged. John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Paul Newman, and James Garner were among those who attended events there, Newman and Garner even taking to the track themselves in Porsche pro-am races. The intersection of cinema and racing lent Ontario an added sheen: a sense that it existed not only within motor sport but also within a broader cultural landscape.

Charlie Brockton, then president of USAC, was a man not given to understatement, yet even by his standards his assessment was striking. “The Ontario Motor Speedway is the most exciting development in automobile racing since Tony Hulman bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1948,” he declared. It was high praise, and not misplaced, for Ontario was soon hailed as the Indianapolis of the West, which soubriquet its creators had cultivated and nourished.

Its inaugural IndyCar event, the 1970 USAC California 500, underlined that ambition. Jim McElreath, a 42-year-old ex-bricklayer from Texas who had cut his racing teeth on the perilous dirt bullrings of his native Arlington, Tarrant County, took victory in an AJ Foyt-entered Coyote-Ford, and the winner’s trophy was presented by California’s state governor, the ex-film star Ronald Reagan, who would in time ascend to the presidency of the United States. The symbolism was unmistakable: it was not merely a race but an occasion, and a convergence of all-American sport, showbiz, and politics.

Nor did the Speedway confine itself to a single discipline. To this day it remains the only venue ever to have staged F1, IndyCar (then under the USAC banner), NASCAR, and NHRA events. In 1970 it hosted the then richest drag race in history, its quarter-mile strip ingeniously repurposing its long and wide pitlane, which, to maximise traction, had been coated in a sticky resin compound laid by a hovering helicopter. Danny Ongais, alternately nicknamed either On-gas or the flyin’ Hawaiian, set the best time of the day, a blistering 6.56 seconds, in Carl Casper’s striking red, white, and blue Young American dragster. Ongais would go on to race in USAC with great success, and even briefly in F1.

The following year brought further milestones. In February 1971 AJ Foyt, a titan of Stateside racing, won the Ontario Miller High Life 500, driving a Wood Brothers-entered Mercury Cyclone in the 1000th Grand National race in NASCAR history. On the same day and in the same place Evel Knievel, the 1970s’ most celebrated daredevil, performed a motorcycle jump on his Harley-Davidson XR-750, clearing 19 cars that spanned 129 feet (39 metres) in a record-breaking feat that gripped not just America but the world. My eight-year-old friends and I, more than 5000 miles away in London, England, all tried to emulate Knievel on our Raleigh Choppers. And, as I have explained above, the following month, Andretti, an American legend himself of course, added his own chapter by winning the F1 Questor Grand Prix on the infield road course that had been laid out within the Ontario oval’s vast embrace.

Even beyond motor sport, the Ontario Motor Speedway positioned itself as a venue of national significance. In 1974 it hosted California Jam, a music festival that drew more than 300,000 attendees and featured a line-up that read like a who’s who of the era’s rock scene: Earth, Wind, and Fire; Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; Black Sabbath; Deep Purple; Rare Earth; and many more. California Jam II was staged in 1978, and it was also massively well attended.

Yet, even as race fans and music lovers filed through the turnstiles in their multitudes, the seeds of the Ontario Motor Speedway’s demise were being quietly sown. The very scale that made it so impressive also rendered it vulnerable. The economics of such an enterprise were unforgiving, and, as the 1970s wore on, it became increasingly apparent that the land on which the great Speedway stood would yield better returns if it were repurposed for more conventional commercial deployment. In an era not yet attuned to the preservation of sporting heritage, sentiment counted for little against balance sheets.

In 1980 the inevitable occurred. Chevron Land Co, part of the Chevron oil giant, purchased the site, and the Ontario Motor Speedway, that gleaming monument to American auto racing ambition, was unceremoniously demolished. In its place rose the familiar architecture of late-20th-century commerce: condominiums, apartments, offices, malls, hotels, restaurants, and bars. The transformation was thorough, ruthless even. Where Chaparrals and Parnellis, Dodges and Plymouths, and even Ferraris and Lotuses had once thundered at the limit, shoppers now strolled; where engines had once screamed, cash registers now chimed.

In August 1980 Ontario hosted its final California 500, won by Bobby Unser for Roger Penske. Four months later Bobby’s brother Al rocked up at Ontario to test his 1981 Longhorn LR01 IndyCar, a blatant copy of the all-conquering ground-effect 1980 Williams FW07 F1 car; a few days later Gordon Johncock tested his 1981 Wildcat Mk8 IndyCar there, too; it was the last time that a race car was ever driven at the Ontario Motor Speedway.

Today, nothing of it remains. OK, granted, a few ghostly echoes persist in the form of some racing-themed street names – of which Ferrari Lane probably most surprises those who drive their Cadillac Escalades along it today, perhaps on their way from Kura Revolving Sushi Bar to Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers (I kid you not) – but they are but faint traces of a past that has been largely effaced. If you were to stand there now, if you did not know, you would see no sign that your feet were planted on land on which had been built one of the most ambitious racing complexes ever conceived.

Ferrari Lane is now the gateway to a branch of Hooters

There is, in that daydream, a melancholy that extends beyond mere nostalgia. Motor sport has always been a dialogue between permanence and transience, between the enduring appeal of speed and the shifting landscapes on which it is pursued. Circuits come and racetracks go; some evolve; others vanish entirely. Yet Ontario’s story feels particularly poignant because of the scale of its ambition and the brevity of its existence. In 12 years it rose, it flourished, and it fell, leaving behind a legacy that is at once both vivid and ephemeral.

So we return to that Sunday, in March, 1971, almost exactly 55 years ago, when Andretti’s Ferrari sang its flat-12 aria as he powered it around a new circuit that seemed destined to endure, and even to conquer. The Questor Grand Prix may have faded from collective memory, but it serves as a portal to a larger narrative, one that speaks of vision and extravagance, of cultural convergence and economic reality. It reminds us that even in a sport defined by motion, some of the most compelling stories are about places, not cars.

There is, finally, an irony that is difficult to ignore. Over the decades, oil companies have been among motor sport’s most steadfast patrons, their logos prominent everywhere, their investments sustaining and promoting racing’s relentless pursuit of sporting popularity. Yet in the case of Ontario, it was an oil company – Chevron – that sent the curtain crashing down on one of the most extraordinary racetracks ever built. I have always been tempted to cast that act as a kind of betrayal; but, in fairness, perhaps that would be too simple, and too neat, because if Chevron had not bought, demolished, and redeveloped the Ontario Motor Speedway, someone else almost certainly would have done. After all, the exact same fate would befall the less glitzy but wilder Riverside International Raceway, just 20 miles east of Ontario, in 1989, and for precisely the same reason. In the end, even the grandest of circuits must answer to the world beyond their boundaries, and that world is not interested in the echoes of V8s or even flat-12s reverberating across the Californian sky. But I am, and perhaps you are now, too.