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Well, we’ve finally arrived at the last event of the 2009 race season. It will take place near Yarmouth at Lake Doucette Motor Speedway this Saturday starting at 11 am. The main event is a 150 lap Sportsman race and from all reports, the field should be a large one with a lot of the best Sportsman cars and drivers taking part.
Their will also be a couple of 4 cylinder divisions racing and an “Outlaw” race. These Outlaw events are always exciting as drivers and crews do some “off the wall” stuff to their cars in hopes of gaining an advantage.
The purses for this event are large as well, with over $8000.00 to be awarded in the Sportsman class alone. For Lake Doucette, this will be their only event of the 2009 season. After 2007, the track was closed, only to be reopened by the drivers themselves, in an attempt to keep racing alive on the south shore.
These type of operations rarely meet with much success as the management and operation side of racing does not often coincide with the racing side. This leads to chaos and disharmony and the eventual shutting down once again.
At Lake Doucette, many of these difficulties reared their ugly heads but unlike most ventures of this type, Carmen Comeau and his team of assistants soldiered on, closing the facility for 2009 with full intentions of reopening in 2010 on a full time basis. Things started coming together quickly for them and they decided to stage this one event, with everyone dedicating many hours to it. Many sponsors jumped on board and the “Murray GM Sportsman 150” was a reality.
Originally, I had planned to make the trek to Yarmouth for this event, but my doctors and my health have cancelled this idea. However, I do have some eyes in the crowd and will bring you a detailed account of the event next week, as part of my final column for 2009.
Last weekend the Atlantic Championships took place at Centre for Speed in Shediac. Now that it is over, I am sure that Tim Wile, manager /owner of Centre for Speed, and his management team must be having nightmares over it.
Rain, most of the week prior to the event, turned the pits into a swamp and the track was seeping water in several places. Heavy rains forced the postponement of Saturday’s schedule at which Wile was forced into the “rain date on Monday” scenario. However, Wile later succumbed to the pressure from drivers and staff, opting to stage the whole event on Sunday.
Things went rapidly downhill after that. The track was slippery and cold causing multiple spinouts and accidents, destroying any flow to the action, and pushing the event into the wee morning hours of Monday, before it came to a close. Don’t get me wrong here. There was lots of action and excitement on the track too, but the cautions and the bitter cold winds left the fans generally unhappy with the outcome of the events.
On Facebook, and many discussion forums on the Internet, Mr Wile has been highly criticized for everything that went wrong. While I think mistakes were made along the way, (and what event doesn’t have those), a lot of the criticism is unfair and unjustified. The last time I looked anyway, Mr Wile did not make it rain and Mr Wile certainly did not bring the cold wind and freezing temperatures.
If those two things had not happened, the racing would have been great, with large car counts in every class, and people would have been talking about what a great event it was, instead of condemming it.
The one thing that could have been better was the pre event organization, with more attention being paid to the “what do I do If …” possibilities. Nevertheless, nothing would have changed the fact that the rains came, and nothing would have changed the fact that it was way too cold …
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