Ontrario Motor Speedway Logo

Ontario Motor Speedway in Ontario, California, is a 2.5 mile replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Speedway, Indiana. The track was built for a cool $25.5 million and at the time, was considered state of the art. Track Management planned to make OMS just like IMS and hold one race a year. The first race, The California 500, was a success; but this track was going downhill faster and the only way for OMS to make money was to promote it better. OMS held the California Jam, the Califonia Jam was rock music with numerous bands to list and it made a proffit. NASCAR was running at OMS for a few years and would hold the last race of the NASCAR Winston (now Nextel) Cup Series there until the track died after the 1980 racing season.

With OMS in more red ink than it has ever seen, track managment went bankrupt and the speedway was a big flop. 1980 would be its last year of operation and the track was sold to Chevron Land Managment which demolished the track and made it an empty lot. Today, OMS is nothing but a memory and you can find stuff from OMS on eBay, but the property where OMS was has not been touched since it was demolished in 1981.

Ontario Motor Speedway

First Race; Sept. 6, 1970

Last Race; November 1980

Cause of death: mixture of both bad management and not promoting the racetrack (testing, misc. stuff) just to generate money.