Chuckwalla Valley Raceway

Chuckwalla Valley Raceway, known to regulars simply as Chuckwalla, is a 2.68 mile paved road course in Desert Center, California, in the high desert east of Palm Springs and near Joshua Tree National Park. Opened in 2010 and designed by Ed Bargy, the 17 turn circuit is one of Southern California's premier purpose-built road courses and a fixture of the regional track day and club racing scene.

The layout is what makes Chuckwalla special for driver development. It can be run both clockwise and counter-clockwise, effectively giving students two distinct circuits to learn, and it features numerous elevation changes woven through a flowing sequence of corners. That mix of fast sweepers, technical sections, and undulating terrain rewards precise inputs and good vision, making it an excellent classroom for building car control and reading a track. The facility sits on roughly 1,000 acres of former WWII-era military training ground, later farmland, before it was transformed into the road course it is today.

For drivers, Chuckwalla matters because it pairs a demanding, character-rich layout with the open, low-traffic desert calendar that high performance driving programs need. It regularly hosts NASA and SCCA track days, time trials, and HPDE sessions, along with motorcycle road racing through CVMA, giving students a proving ground that scales from first laps to competitive racecraft.