A Los Angeles investor has bought the 63-acre Irwindale Speedway in the San Gabriel Valley, with plans to turn it into an industrial park.
IDS Real Estate Group, based Downtown L.A., has bought the NASCAR oval and NHRA drag strip at 500 Speedway Drive, northeast of Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Star-Tribune reported. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The seller was Irwindale Outlet Partners, based in Ontario, which paid $22 for the motor speedway in 2012.
For the short term, the motorsports track will remain open to NASCAR and drag racing events.
“We are already working on extending (the lease),” track President Tim Huddleston told the Star-Tribune. “There is no gloom and doom for Irwindale Speedway.”
But there may be bulldozers over the horizon for what’s considered the best short track in America.
The Irwindale Speedway opened in 1999 atop a former garbage dump surrounded by gravel quarries, filling a void left by the shuttered Riverside International Raceway, Ontario Motor Speedway and Saugus Speedway.
The half-mile track and eighth-mile drag strip were slated to close in January 2018, before Huddleston took it over in December 2017.
In 2015, the city of Irwindale approved plans to demolish the speedway and turn it into a 700,000-square-foot outdoor mall. The approval involved a zone change, site plan, design review and certification of a final Environmental Impact Report.
Now a city-specific plan envisions the speedway as an industrial and business park to “take advantage of the site’s location in proximity to major transportation arterials and the regional transportation network.”
Officials envision 59 acres of the racetrack to be divided into four planning areas, with more than 1.3 million square feet of industrial space. An environmental impact report for the industrial site is underway.
In July, IDS Real Estate and Hackman Capital Partners filed plans to build a 244,000-square-foot office complex in Culver City.
In January, the office landlord bought a 33-building industrial park in Walnut for nearly $109 million.
— Dana Bartholomew
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