SPORTS FLASHBACK 1974: A day at the Gimli races

The last time I went to the races it was at the Brooklands Speedway and that was a place where you went to see stock cars plummeting around a one-quarter-mile dirt oval, waiting for an accident to happen. And it usually didn’t take very long, either.

Those stock car races could be described as a roller-derby-on-dirt, and many of the races were a matter of the last-man-standing, or perhaps to put it another way, the last driver still moving.

But watching cars crashing into each other at the Speedway was more exciting than the Marchand demolition derby, where the whole idea was to destroy the other driver’s car.

But I had never been to the road races at Gimli, so when Gary asked me to take a few photos during time trials, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Turned out there was a large contingent of Steinbach race fans, travelling there on the weekend to watch Steinbach’s Gary Loewen show his stuff in the first Formula Ford race of the season.

While I enjoyed the races, the feature race left a lot to be desired as far as the uninitiated spectator was concerned. The race was seventy-five laps around the one-point-three-mile track and after the third lap, I found I no longer knew who was the leader. I got no help from the announcer either, for he was constantly drowned out by the noisiest cars I have ever heard. As hard as it is to believe, the noise level at Gimli is decibels higher than anything experienced at the Steinbach Arena when the Ste Anne Aces come to town.

While the Players race was supposed to be the big one, the Atlantic formula cars didn’t really impress me that much and I enjoyed the closed wheel events and the Formula Ford races far more. There, at least, the races were shorter, just as exciting, and I could keep track of the cars better.

Like the rest of the Steinbach group, who watched the races from a plywood platform mounted to the roof of a van, I was there to watch Gary Loewen in action.

Gary Loewen raced his Formula Ford Lola to a second place finish in the points event at Gimli, which moved him into a second place tie in the standings for the Prairie Region. About 25 drivers compete at Gimli and Edmonton on the Formula Ford circuit.

Gary is enjoying the best year of the four he has been running Formula Fords.

In the first race for his class, Loewen was leading when his rear brakes went and he finished in third spot behind teammate Barry Fox of Edmonton.

The next race at Gimli will be run in August and the Canadian run-offs for Formula Fords will be held there in October.

I may just borrow a set of hearing-protection headsets from one of the pressmen at Derksen Printers and join the real racing fans for another trip to Gimli.

On the other hand, I may decide that my auto-race watching should be limited to the odd trip to Keystone Dragway, or perhaps taking in the Indy 500 on television…with the sound turned down, of course.