Canadian Tire Motorsport Park has a link on its website that advertises what it calls Major Events. Click and you will find the Victoria Day Speedfest featuring the Pinty’s Series for stock cars, and the Mobil 1 SportsCar weekend, and the NASCAR truck series race on Labour Day weekend. And so-on.
Included in this lineup is the VARAC Vintage Grand Prix weekend in the middle of June but, in recent years, it really hasn’t been what you would call a major event. If truth be told, it’s hasn’t been much more than a great big club meeting.
But that’s going to change this year. Why? Because Formula One cars are returning to CTMP the weekend of June 15-18. The Masters Historic Racing Series, which races F1 cars that were built between 1966 and 1985, will run a practice session on the Thursday, qualify on Friday and then race twice on Saturday.
Now, I know there are those of you out there who, when you hear the word “vintage,” conjure up images of a bunch of old guys driving a bunch of old racing cars around CTMP at the speed of slug.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Yes, these guys are older than Lance Stroll but the cars have been restored to their racing days glory and the drivers are not out for Sunday drives. They race those cars as hard as they were raced when their drivers – Jackie Stewart, Emmerson Fittipaldi, Gilles Villeneuve, et al – were in their prime.
And they even emulate the drivers who made the cars famous. The guy driving Stewart’s car, for instance, will be wearing a helmet with the Royal Stewart tartan ring around it. And the fellow wheeling Gilles’s Ferrari will wear a replica Villeneuve helmet and uniform.
The Masters Historic Racing Series will be appearing on the undercard of the Grand Prix du Canada the weekend before at Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Montreal. That’s not a bad place to get warmed up to take on Old Mosport.
I will have more on the Vintage weekend as it approaches. But I really hope the addition of the F1 cars plus the fact that VARAC and CTMP have been selected to host the Canadian round of the 2017 Diamond Jubilee Formula Junior World Tour for the Peter Revson Trophy results in a great spectator turnout.
Speaking of Formula One, the Canadian International AutoShow, which opens to the public at the downtown Metro Toronto Convention Centre next Friday and goes for 10 days, ending on Feb. 26, has got a wonderful exhibit/display that’s celebrating Fifty Years of F1 Grand Prix Racing in Canada.
Located in a hall downstairs in the North Building, directly across the aisle from Auto Exotica, the exhibit will feature nearly a dozen F1 cars that – except for one – all raced in a Canadian Grand Prix.
The prize of the exhibit is the 1997 Williams-Renault F1 car that our own Jacques Villeneuve drove to the world championship that year. As we all know, Jacques pulled a surprise pass on Michael Schumacher in the closing stages of the last race of the season at Jerez, Spain, and Schumacher turned into him in an attempt to block him.
The tire mark from Schumacher’s failed attempt to stop JV is still on the car featured in the exhibit.
As well, the car that Gilles Villeneuve drove to his first F1 victory, at Montreal in 1978, is part of the display, as is the Ferrari that Nigel Mansell drove for the Scuderia in 1990. One of Schumacher’s Benettons will be there and there is a Walter Wolf-Ford, a 1987 Lotus and a 1975 Parnelli. Plus photos, films and other memorabilia.
Don’t miss Fifty Years of Grand Prix Racing in Canada at this year’s Canadian International AutoShow.
Short Takes: FEL (Franczak Enterprises Ltd.), a learning and promotion company serving the automotive sector since 1986, will sponsor this year’s Formula 1600 Super Series that will include races at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, Calabogie Motorsports Park and the Grand Pix du Trois-Rivieres. A fourth race will be announced. The winner will receive $5,000, winner take all. To be eligible, an entrant must enter and start all four Super Series races. It’s great to see Canadian companies supporting national grassroots racing. . . . Canada’s Pete McLeod, who’s been making steady improvement every year, scored a third-place finish in the first race of the 2017 Red Bull Air RaceSeries season at Abu Dhabi during the weekend. The winner was Martin Sonka of the Czech Republic . . . The Verizon IndyCar Series held a two-day open test at Phoenix International Raceway (I can never figure out how you can have an “open” test for a series that’s a closed shop, but they call golf tournaments “opens” too, but you have to have a PGA Tour Card to enter, so I guess it’s just an expression) and not a lot happened except that Alexander Rossi, the Indy 500 champion, crashed. Not badly, but he gave the wall a whack. Everybody said it felt good to get back in the saddle and that was about it. Oh, the drivers with Chevrolet engines were dominant during the day and those with Honda engines were faster at night. Go figure. The 2017 season gets under way at St. Petersburg, Fla., in March. NASCAR, of course, will run off the Busch Clash next Saturday night and then the drivers will qualify for the Daytona 500 on Sunday afternoon. Like baseball, if you want to run in the NASCAR Cup series you have to own a franchise, so that pretty much eliminates anybody from showing up and going racing. For me, that was always an appeal of the big races like Daytona, where the qualifying races would often see a bunch of guys from Joe’s Garage in Reston, Va., make it into the Great American Race. Not any more, though, and racing’s the poorer for it.
nmcdonald@thestar.ca
nmcdonald@thestar.ca
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