Show that you and your car have got what it takes to race
The Ontario 1500 Adventure is a weeklong endurance event for the ordinary driver
One of the most common complaints around motorsport these days is that even the most basic competitions have become too expensive for the casual participant.
There’s an event being staged for the first time soon that’s setting out to change that.
For $2,300 and a week of your time, you and one to three teammates can use your own car to tour and compete on some of the best motorsport facilities Ontario has to offer.
The Ontario 1500 Motorsport Adventure powered by Motomaster Eliminator is a concept that’s part endurance and all run-what-yabrung grassroots racing featuring an unprecedented amount of track time and plenty of fun along the way.
Named for the 1,500 kilometres that competitors will traverse over seven days between Sept. 14 and 21, its route visits seven different facilities across the province: Calabogie Motorsports Park, Picton Airport, Shannonville Motorsport Park, Toronto Motorsports Park, Grand Bend Motorplex and two separate days on a pair of track layouts at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park.
Teams will take their best shots at autoslalom courses, time attack laps on professional-grade race tracks and quarter-mile runs on dragstrips. The team with the best combined time across all of the competitive events will be declared the overall winner.
To ensure that everyone is given a level playing field, there are classes for stock road cars, modified cars and track-dedicated cars that will have to be towed in or on a trailer. There are prizes for the overall victors as well as those in each class, including a set of Eibach performance springs. For their entry fee, competitors receive track access each day, breakfast and lunch on site, a free Motomaster Eliminator battery courtesy of Canadian Tire, team uniforms and an awards celebration at the end of the week.
That leaves additional costs of fuel and tires, evening meals and accommodation up to the teams to cover themselves. Several hotels are offering discounted rates to competitors, and free camping is available at each racetrack for those on a tight budget.
Gary Wood, an official with the Time Attack series at the Canadian Automobile Sport Clubs — Ontario Region who is also the principal organizer of the Ontario 1500, says this inaugural event was conceived to shed some light on the wide variety of offerings available to would-be racers in the province. “It’s really for amateur drivers to experience the wonderful venues that Ontario offers for motorsports,” Wood says. “We hit on the idea of running a special event that would stand out to get more people interested and knowledgeable about motorsport in the province so that they might participate in CASC activities.”
CASC-OR exists primarily to give amateur racers a safe, legal place to race, and Wood says this event really hammers this point home.
“The police forces across the province are very anti-street racing and we are too,” Wood explains. “We want to make sure that we’re demonstrating that the race tracks in Ontario — and there’s a lot of them — they’re very good places, they’re enjoyable, and there’s lots of opportunity to take advantage of these facilities.”
Further to this, Wood points out that although there are daily drives between each of the racetracks along the route, those transit stages are emphatically not part of the timed portion of the event.
“We will follow all of the rules of the road and the laws of the Province of Ontario,” Wood says.
“If anyone gets a moving violation, they’re automatically excluded from the event.”
Wood and his team of six volunteers will be accepting entries right up until a couple of days before the proceedings get under way. So if anybody reading this is interested, you have just a little more than a week to get signed up. And if you haven’t got the means or the wherewithal to join in this year’s festivities but you’d like to see what it’s all about, every day and every facility offers an open invitation.
“If anyone wants to come out during the event and watch what’s happening, they’re more than welcome,” Wood says. “It’s free.”
For more information on the Ontario 1500 Motorsport Adventure and to find a complete schedule of events, visit ontario1500.com. For more on CASC-OR and its amateur motorsport programs, visit casc.on.ca. Freelance writer Stephanie Wallcraft is a frequent contributor to Toronto Star Wheels. To reach her, email
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