Sometimes the Roll of the Dice Determines a Winner
Jamie Ramsay sits in his street stock in the pit area yards away from his trailer. He is talking on his cell phone while the crew hustle around the car making last minute adjustments and preparations before the final segment of the race event last Friday. There isn’t much time between the segments so Jamie figures he will stay in the race car and save himself the aggravation of unplugging and unbuckling only to have to get ready to go again.

The 50 lap special event race for the street stock division was divided into 3 segments – two 20 lap and one 10 lap. Starting positions for the first 20 lap race were determined by time trials with a roll of the dice to set the inversion. Segments two and three saw the finish order from the previous race inverted once again by a dice roll.

Jamie finished second in the middle segment and is waiting to hear where the roll of the dice will put him in the starting line up for the third. “Snake eyes would be nice” he says optimistically. When the news comes, he isn’t impressed. “Twelve” he explodes “like double sixes? How could he roll that?” With only 10 laps in the final segment, there will be eleven very motivated competitors in front of him and Jamie knows that winning this one will be a stretch. But he is determined to give it his best shot.

Through the evening, the air has been electric in the street stock pit area as the teams take on the four different but interrelated challenges of this event. First up is the qualifying; time trials– something that has never been done before in this division.

Most of the street stock division competitors have no previous experience with time trials and for Jamie, this challenge required research and strategy. “I called Doug Stewart (Nascar Late Model division driver) and asked him” he explains. Doug and Jamie run two of the cars carrying the CAN-USA logo; which makes them team cars of sorts. “He told me what he does. And he told me about tire pressures and getting the tires heated up quick.” Doug’s advice apparently worked for Jamie as he qualified second.

The street stock division usually runs a 25 lap feature race at each event, so the 20 lap segments of this event, sandwiched in between races run by other divisions, are almost full feature races. With the line up for the next segment determined by the dice, it is difficult to know whether to go hard or go easy, but one thing is clear; you have to stay out of trouble to be there for the next one. With the season winding down and the points race heating up, making it to that final 10 lap race is crucial for teams battling for the championship.

The final 10 lap dash begins badly with a caution flag out before the cars have even reached the flag stand to officially take the green, but most of the cars avoid the mess. The rest of the way is a tangle of cars, vying for better positions, their metallic paint glinting in the floodlights that illuminate the speedway. The effect of watching such a race is like experiencing airplane turbulence; it triggers part apprehension, part adrenaline and part amazement.

Jamie was able to find his way from his 11th starting spot up to finish in fourth. “We needed the race to be a little longer” he said afterwards. “Fifteen laps would have been good”.

But for race winner Scott Nagy, ten laps was definitely enough. Scott qualified well enough as the evening started, but had a panhard mount break during the first segment. That fixed, he got tangled up in a wreck in the second segment and cut down a tire.

The double six roll of the dice before the third segment allowed him to start the final race on the outside pole and he took the lead early. In the race everybody wanted to win, there was bound to be tough challenges for the lead and Scott had Dan Monaghan and Ray Morneau on his back bumper for much of the race. “After all we’d been through, the car wasn’t too bad” Scott said later. “It could have been better, but it was good enough.”

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Carrie Wernham Shows Women Where Their Place Is
Auto racing continues to be a men’s sport. There are many women who are passionate fans of the sport, but when it comes to participants, women are still massively underrepresented behind the steering wheels and on the crews of stock car teams across the continent.

Sure, on a Friday night there are lots of women in the pit area. They are usually the wives, girlfriends and mothers of the men who drive and work on the cars and many of them play important roles in keeping the teams running smoothly. They tend to do timing and record, polish the race car, organize food for team members and keep the contingency decals in good order and while these are all extremely important functions, they are also jobs which involve women without really involving them.

Only occasionally do women show up in more central positions on race teams. Currently at Delaware there are two women drivers; Aimee Bloemendal and Sarah Cotton who are both in the Challenger Truck Division.

And then there is Carrie Wernham who has been a fulltime pit crew member of the RKR team for 5 years. Carrie does take care of the decals on the #52 Late Model, and she keeps the car looking its best. She makes sure the driver’s water bottle is filled before the race. However Carrie can also be found on any Friday night, setting tire temperatures, working on the brakes, or changing a rear end gear.

Carrie has worked a number of non-traditional jobs such as tearing apart and rebuilding flood or fire damaged homes and buildings for Restoration Masters and finishing furniture for a company in Strathroy but she is not a mechanic nor does she have any formal training in anything automotive related. When she approached the RKR team about becoming a member, she had only her ability to learn quickly and a huge desire to work on a race car.

In the beginning, Carrie took on the jobs traditionally assigned to female team members. She became so proficient at replacing the complex decals that cover the race car that Dave and Matt from AutoTrim Design and Graphics no longer needed to make weekly visits.

However, Carrie wanted to be more involved with the mechanical aspects of the race car and one by one she has learned most of the jobs required to repair and maintain the race car. She would watch other crew members doing the job, ask questions and then get in there and try it. After that, it was practise, practise and practise until she had it mastered.

RKR crew chief Ken Kellistine encourages his team members to learn as much about all aspects of the race car as possible. “Flexibility is something that we encourage” Ken says. “There are people who do one thing or another better, so they take the lead in that job, but everybody ends up being able to do almost every job we need done.”

And this has suited Carrie well. Even if she isn’t doing the work herself, she knows what is needed to do the job. “She’s a great team player” Ken says “she will be there with exactly what you need next”

This season, when Ryan Ward who had taken care of the tires for the RKR team for many years moved away to continue his education, Carrie took on that job. Tires – their circumference, their temperature and their air pressure - are a major obsession of any late model team that wants to do well, so Carrie has had plenty to learn and more responsibility.

On a Friday night, with a 40 lap feature race, the pit crew is only called on when and if things go wrong; flat tires, mechanical problems, broken parts. But several times a year, the RKR team runs in the Cascar Super Series where much longer races make tire changes and refuelling necessary. At these races, Carrie is a tire carrier. It is her job to make sure that the tire she is carrying gets over the pit wall and precisely in position so it can quickly replace the one the tire changer is removing from the car – and every second counts.

There is always a new challenge and Carrie has been practising to move into a tire changer position. At the May Cascar race she got the opportunity to give this position a try.

There is nothing stopping women from being more actively involved in maintaining, preparing and repairing race cars, but traditionally women have stayed away. Perhaps, however, Carrie will be an inspiration to those women who are interested but never thought that working on a race car was a serious possibility.

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Jason Hathway - a Dedicated Knowledgable Team
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Super Series Runs its Best for the Labor Day Race
In most sports, the biggest event of the year is usually the final one – like the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup. In the world of stock car racing however, Nascar, the premier stock car series in North America, holds its biggest and most prestigious event in February to jumpstart the season. And this big event is not just one race. It is a two week extravaganza nick-named “Speed Weeks” that includes trade shows, media events, twin 125 lap qualifying races and 10 days of racing action showcasing a dozen different race car classes at several local tracks – all of which leads up to the main event; the Daytona 500.

Cascar – the Canadian Association of Stock Car Auto Racing – follows a pattern similar to the NASCAR schedule with its Super Series cars running a season opener on the Victoria Day Weekend. Time trials and twin 100 lap qualifying races are part of a three day program which culminates in the race on Sunday.

Equal in status on the Cascar schedule, however, is the Labour Day event which runs this weekend at Delaware Speedway. “It has become a very important event on the racing calendar” says Cascar President Tony Novotny “Teams want to run this race even though they don’t usually race in the (Cascar Super) Series.”

When Tony first started the Labour Day event, there were obstacles and set backs to deal with. Tony explains. “First of all, there were quite a number of events running on that weekend and that was a tough thing to compete against.”

Then there was the weather. One year, a mini tornado hit the area just as the band hired to entertain the spectators was beginning to play. It blew down tents and caused damage and chaos. Another year, the event had to be rescheduled three times due to bad weather - finally running in early November.

Despite the difficulties, this event continued to grow and has now become a local tradition; often attracting between 18,000 and 22,000 spectators over the three days of its run. For drivers and their teams, winning this race, like winning the Daytona 500, is considered a prestigious accomplishment.
Pete Vanderwyst and Ron Sheridan both run in Delaware’s late model division but for the Labour Day weekend, in addition to their late model driving duties, they will be among those racers firing up their Cascar machines to run in the Super Series event.

For Pete, it will be a return to Cascar Super Series action after several seasons away. “I am looking forward to running with my old buddies” he says. Pete’s car will carry the logo of the race’s main sponsor APC Auto Parts Centres as part of a deal that put the CAN-USA sponsorship on Pete’s late model throughout the summer.

Although Ron Sheridan has never run the Cascar Super Series full time, he and his team are no strangers to Cascar events, and they can often be found in the line up for Series events at Delaware, Cayuga and Kawartha Speedways. “We look forward to running these longer races” Ron explains “because 300 laps requires different strategies and pit stops so the whole team is more involved.”

For Ron and Pete jumping into a Cascar late model again after driving the new style Delaware late models throughout the season will require an adjustment in driving styles. After the late model Triple 50’s are over Friday night, they will shift their focus to their Cascar programs. “It will take a little time in practise” Ron says. “The Cascar is faster on the straightaways than the late model and a bit trickier to get through the corners.”

Friday night, in addition to the Triple 50’s run by the late models, will be the Challenger Trucks and King of the Hill competition. King of the Hill, which has become a fan favourite, has spectators run their street vehicles around one lap of the track in heats of two until only one vehicle remains as the winner.

Saturday night’s line up includes racing by the street stocks, open wheel modifieds and the Enduro Allstars. Enduro Allstars competition pits the top 40 Endurance division drivers, who usually run only a 250 lap race, against each other in heat races, a consi and a 25 lap feature race.

Saturday afternoon, the Cascar Series cars qualify via time trials for their 300 lap race which runs Sunday starting at 2pm. Sunday activities also include an autograph session which runs for an hour starting at 11:15 and jackman and tireman contests.

With two more Cascar Super Series races still to complete in September, this event is really only one more step on the ladder towards the championship for Cascar drivers and their teams, however, with competition tough and bragging rights at stake, this race, which has become a tradition, is sure to be anything but traditional.

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