It’s no secret that motorcycle road racing is in the dumps. Fewer events and competitors, lower attendance, increasing costs, generally hard financial times for the young who are the backbone of the sport – it all hurts, whether you’re talking Moto GP or racing here in Canada at both National and Regional levels.
Another factor that doesn’t help is the number of racing organizations chasing the same customers (i.e., competitors). In Ontario, the relatively new SOAR (Southern Ontario Association of Racing) has done best in the last few years. From its racing base at Grand Bend, north of Windsor, it’s collected many racers from south-western Ontario and the GTA. Those racers have in many cases represented losses to RACE, the decades-old organization from Shannonville, not far from Kingston.
RACE has also suffered from losing the bulk of its Quebec riders, many of whom have either given up the sport completely or raced at the Mirabel Circuit near Montreal with the Track Fever group. However, Track Fever has now closed up, so perhaps some of the fast Quebecers will be heading west again. Meanwhile, SOAR and RACE have agreed on an experiment to do reciprocal races in 2014. For one race in each series, each organization will honour the licence of the other group, with the bonus that any points scored will count in the racer’s home series. The two groups will fiddle their class structures accordingly (they aren’t really that far apart anyway).
According to SOAR owner Ken McAdam, CSBK is also interested in getting involved in some fashion, but no details are available as yet.
Both groups are looking at their schedules and canvassing members to see which races would go over best as reciprocal events; more info to be posted as known. As McAdam said to his group, “If we can make this work we are looking at bigger and better things for 2015!”
In the meantime, here are the published schedules for both SOAR and RACE:
RACE (all events at Shannonville Motorsport Park)
- May 9-11
- June 27-29
- July 18-20
- Aug 08-10
- Sept 26-28
SOAR (all events at Grand Bend Raceway)
- May 23-25
- June 13-15
- July 11-13
- August 15-17
- September 19-21
- October 3-5
The CSBK series schedule was already posted here.
SOAR’s done a great job. I’m looking forward to the races. It looks like there might be a joint VRRA endurance race as GB in 2014 as well.
As McAdam said to his group, “If we can make this work we are looking at bigger and better things for 2015!”
Let’s hope !!!