BEMC Spring Trophy Races at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park – May 3 to 5 Race Report

The Enhanced Performance, Good Cars Only, Gabo Solutions #77 Formula Mazda Team had a good race weekend at the BEMC Spring Trophy Races held at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park. We were entered in the Formula Classic/Formula Libre race group. There were a total of 17 cars in our race group including, six F1200’s, three F1600’s, two Formula 4’s, one Historic Formula Ford, one Formula Four, one Van Diemen F2000, amongst some other cars. The May weather was very nice Friday and Saturday with rain and fog Sunday morning, with some sunshine on Sunday afternoon with temperatures ranging from 10 to 20° C.

Over the course of Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we were on track a total of 8 times; 4 on-track practices during the Friday test day, followed by qualifying and Race 1 on Saturday and Race 3 on Sunday. We opted out of racing in Race 2 on Sunday morning as we felt the conditions were just not safe with the amount of fog around the race course. Our race class had some beautiful open wheel race cars including Jim Morton’s unbelievably fast Gamma Tercero F4.
Our best lap for the test day was a 1: 24 flat on old Hoosier tires from the previous year, pretty impressive for old race tires.

Saturday morning, the weather was perfect – about 17°C and a clear sky. We switched to another used set of Hoosiers. We set a reasonable P3 practice time of 1:24.747 (P1 in our class). During qualifying, we set a P4 time of 1:25.824 (P2 in our class). During Race 1, we diced back and forth with Jim Morton and spun on the outside of turn 2, relegating us to P6 in our race group and P2 in our class. Our best lap time in Race 1 was a 1.24.740.
The weather on Sunday morning was dreadful, with rain and a very heavy fog. We elected not to run in Race 2 as we just did not feel comfortable with the amount of heavy fog around the race track. As it turned out, lap times were way off as drivers struggled to see.

We had a great start at the beginning of Race 3 right behind Jim Morton gapping the rest of the pack by the end of lap 3. Sadly, Jim was able to get away from us using lapped traffic, we were never able to catch up him.  We finished the race in P3 (P1 in our class) with a best lap time of 1:27.028. Not a great lap time, as the track was still very green from all of the rain over the course of Sunday.

Here is our video race report from the weekend.

​​And a big thank you to Bill and Shirley Vallis of Vallis Motor Sport for their trackside support during the BEMC Spring Trophy Races and to Canadian Tire Motorsports Park for hosting such a fantastic event!!  And last, but certainly not least, we want to thank our long-suffering family which allows us to continue to race……….