SOAR, RACE announce further co-operation

Photo: Mindy Chmielewski

Competing Ontario road racing series RACE and SOAR have announced plans to further combine their efforts in 2015. Following 2014’s start of honouring each other’s licences, and each running one combined race in 2014, the plans are to run their events as “regions” in Ontario, with a season-ending championship weekend for all.

Ken McAdam, head honcho at SOAR, says that a Quebec provincial championship is also envisaged, and that RACE will include Quebec racers in their marketing and admin programs until that happens. He says, “Our goal is to sort the teething problems this season, then take it national for 2016, incorporating all the regionals across the country.

“There are many regional [series] that struggle – ARL (Nova Scotia), Gimli (Manitoba), Mission (B.C.), and more recently RACE (Shannonville). This should hopefully be an avenue to allow sustainability and more importantly growth in the sport.”

He adds that with approaching possibly as many as 100 events across the country, road racing should look much more attractive to potential sponsors, whether regional or national in nature.

Starting in 2015, RACE and SOAR will use the same classes, rules, points awards, and so forth, running their own series as before, although racers will be eligible to run in both. A certain number of points (to be determined) gets a rider invited to a season-end championship weekend, to be held at Shannonville this first year, probably rotating to other tracks in future. Racing that weekend will determine champions for the year.

More on this as we get information, hopefully including the reaction of Professional Motorsports Productions, which runs the current five-round National series.