The VOR GTS series held it's 12th race at Essington Monday night. This ended up being a fast and tight race for everyone. Our usual race reporter has taken a couple weeks off for sick leave so below is the race report and highlights video.

Race Report

Race Video

Dateline – Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Calgary was the host city for the first winter Olympics to be held in Canada.  The year was 1988 and these Olympics featured the first indoor, climate controlled long course speed skating track in the world.  To this date, the speed skating venue remains one of the fastest speed skating tracks in the world made possible by controlling the temperature of the ice to afford the skaters maximum adhesion and speed.   Calgary is home to the Calgary Flames hockey team and is host to the national training facilities for luge and bobsled.  Ice is so much a part of Calgary winters that the city could easily be called the Ice Capital of Canada. 

Calgary is also home to Road One International Raceway, a 7.56 km (4.69 mile) road course that was constructed in 2006 to add another venue for summer vacationers to visit in addition to the Calgary Stampede, one of the largest western rodeos in North America and numerous Festivals for country music, flowers, art, writers, and One World celebration.  Motorsports have not been as successful in Calgary as these other events.  In fact, after trying to compete with Road One International, Calgary’s other motorsports racing facility recently announced “We regret to inform that at 1:00 pm Tuesday, September 9th, 2008, all racing operations by Calgary International Speedway, Inc., the operating company for Race City, are suspended until further notice.  All scheduled racing events for the remainder of the 2008 season have been cancelled.”

What most people don’t know about Road One International Raceway is that the asphalt that was used to create the racing surface at the raceway is a new super hard, multi-cellular asphalt which is far denser than any other asphalt that is used in the Northern Hemisphere.  This asphalt is so dense that the surface does not show any of the little imperfections that lead to cracking and heaving which require constant repairs and patches to provide a good racing surface.  Road One International Raceway has no repairs or patches, because they used this new super asphalt.

Road One International Raceway layout

Several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to individually sit down with the team managers of five of the teams that compete regularly in the ILMS. The managers were: Chris Chappell from Feint Motion Motorsports, Kirk Fried from Frontline Motorsports, Mike Bennett from KRABS Racing, Bruce Fisher from Talon Racing and James Borders from Red Weasel Racing.

The reason I decided to do these interviews was the result of discovering that at least one of the teams entered three GT-1 cars (a Corvette, an Aston and I believe the third was a Saleen). This did not make any sense to me because there would be very little data that could be shared even though all three cars were entered by the same team. It also did not make sense that any team would have the financial resources available to fund all of the extra parts and equipment that would be required to support vehicles from three different manufacturers. With that in mind, I asked team managers to sit and talk with me about their teams independently so that they could answer my questions without the fear of giving away a team secret in the presence of the other managers.