ONTARIO, Calif. -- At first glance it's just a stubby hillock in one corner of a vacant lot, nothing more than a pile of dirt at the intersection of Fourth Street and Haven Avenue. But stare long enough, and you can almost see it. Make the hill a little larger, coat the inside edge in asphalt, and you just might have what some locals believe is the only remaining trace of the most magnificent NASCAR racetrack of its time.

These days it's a commercial park, a bustling collection of banks, hotels and real estate offices alongside Interstate 10. But three decades ago it was the infield of Ontario Motor Speedway, which billed itself as "the world's most modern and beautiful racing facility," and by many accounts fully deserved the title. A $25 million reproduction of Indianapolis, the 2.5-mile rectangular oval had everything -- individual Formula One-style garages, a year-round restaurant, an escalator (a first for a racetrack) and a sound system capable of pumping out more watts than the one at Cape Canaveral.

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"It was way ahead of everybody. It still is," said veteran racer James Hylton, a two-time winner on NASCAR's premier circuit. "Nobody has come up to that standard yet, as far as I'm concerned. You had your own individual garage. They weren't all together like they are now. Every car had its own stall. I don't know if that was good or bad, but it sure was nice to have you own little private garage you could drive into. It was super. It was surely a super speedway."

It was a place ahead of its time -- too ahead of its time. Too lavish and too heavily leveraged, the racing palace that was Ontario became a financial disaster, and was eventually sold by the city to a land management company for $10 million, less than half of the speedway's original cost. The entire place, from its Indy-like brick winner's circle to its Daytona-like main grandstand, was bulldozed. Now all that remains is what may or may not be the old Turn 3 banking, and street names like Ferrari, Porsche, Mercedes and Duesenberg that convey memories of the cars that once raced there.

Kyle Petty remembers visiting the track while it was still under construction in 1970, and being shocked to see palm trees in the infield. "It was the first racetrack I'd ever seen that had palm trees in the infield," said Petty, a teenager at the time, in the area because his father Richard was competing at nearby Riverside International Raceway. "I'd never been to a racetrack where they had trees in the infield. They didn't have any trees in the infield at North Wilkesboro."

It had much more than palm trees. Petty, who along with Ricky Rudd are the only active Nextel Cup drivers to have raced at Ontario, remembers suites topped with viewing platforms and murals of open-wheel cars in the lobby. Before the first NASCAR race there, motorcycle stuntman Evel Knievel entertained the massive crowd by jumping 19 cars. Petty bought a pair of sunglasses just like the daredevil wore.

"It had a speedway club-type atmosphere, it had suites, it had all that stuff before Humpy Wheeler ever thought about doing it," said Petty, referring to the president of Lowe's Motor Speedway, which now features many of the same amenties Ontario did decades ago. "It was the kind of racetrack that if it was still here, you could plug it into the schedule and say, 'Gosh, that's a nice place.' It would compete against any racetrack we have now."

A few miles down I-10 stands its successor, gleaming California Speedway, which faces its own challenge in trying to galvanize an expansive population base around a series still considered a novelty by many in this part of the world. But founders of the Fontana track heeded the lessons learned at Ontario, where the brief, 10-year lifespan stands as a testament to NASCAR's continuing struggle to gain a foothold in the nation's second-largest market, and where the ruins are a reminder that in the infamously fickle metro Los Angeles area, anything can turn to dust.

It all started with so much promise. Befitting its location, Ontario's original investors were a star-studded lot, ranging from racing legends like Parnelli Jones and Roger Penske to actors like Paul Newman and Kirk Douglas. Indianapolis embraced its western twin, which staged an open-wheel event on Labor Day weekend modeled after the Indy 500 on Memorial Day. A.J. Foyt won the first NASCAR race in 1971. Programs from those ambitious early years, available in the gift shop at the city of Ontario museum, boast of an infield larger than two Disneyland theme parks, and grand marshals like Steve Garvey and Valerie Bertinelli.

But even then, there were concerns. The track's year-round restaurant never caught on with locals, who at the time considered the facility too far out of town. Debt began to pile up. Speedway officials, looking for additional streams of revenue, held a concert festival in 1974 called the California Jam, which would become wilder than anything that ever happened on the racetrack. Headliner Deep Purple, the best-selling band in the world at the time, arrived in its own airplane and had to make a hasty exit via helicopter, dodging police who were after band members for trashing television cameras and leaving the stage in flames.

It was the track's last big bang. Benny Parsons won the final NASCAR race at the opulent but overdrawn speedway in November of 1980, and soon after the place was shut down. When Penske prepared to build his own track in the Inland Empire, this one on the site of an old steel mill in Fontana, he used Ontario as a blueprint of what not to do. Rather than saddle the new project with debt, he funded its construction by taking his company public and generating $80 million in cash. Rather than build too many seats, he began with a relatively modest 71,000 to keep demand high.

Those tactics worked -- California Speedway sold out its first seven races, and was sold to the France-run International Speedway Corp. in 1999. But nothing comes easy in L.A. The 2-mile oval, since expanded to 92,000 seats, hasn't drawn a full house since it added a second Nextel Cup event in 2004, and isn't likely to sell out Sunday in the midst of a withering heat wave spiking the temperature well above 100 degrees. The place is under the microscope, like a Hollywood starlet trying to recover from a major studio release that didn't live up to expectations.

That's the way it is in this part of Southern California, which has lost two NFL teams, seen the venerable old road course at Riverside sold to developers, and watched auto racing's premier edifice yield to the wrecking ball. California Speedway has everything -- beautiful and spacious infield facilities, a commuter train station, a retail midway, and a restaurant by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck. But the ghosts of Ontario are never very far away.