> JUKASA SPEEDWAY COMES TO LIFE NEXT WEEKEND
Once upon a time, Cayuga Speedway, a 5/8-mile paved oval set on 121 hectares near Hagersville, about 50 kilometres south of Hamilton, was known as the Crown Jewel of Canadian short tracks.
Owned and operated from the mid-1960s, by the late Bob Slack, the speedway featured the top racing series and the most famous racers of the times.
Slack loved nothing more than to pay NASCAR stars like Dale Earnhardt and Bobby Allison to make guest appearances, and he regularly sold out the 7,500-seat facility.
In 2006, looking to retire, Slack — who was inducted into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame in 2002, along with his wife, Leone — sold the track to investors, who promptly botched things up. After changing hands at least twice more, the speedway went out of business in 2009, and the facility soon fell into disrepair.
Enter southern Ontario businessmen Ken Hill and Jerry Montour. They bought the plant, hired Alex Nagy away from NASCAR Canada to be general manager, and set about renaming, renovating and rejuvenating the place.
Next weekend, for the first time in eight years, what is now called Jukasa Speedway will again roar to life with a two-day program featuring twin 75-lap features for the APC Series Pro Late Models, along with a 75-lap race for the Outlaw Super Late Models.
Saturday will be for practice and qualifying. All the races will be held Sunday, and an extra added attraction on the second day will be the Jordan Szoke Extreme Show, in which Canada’s most successful motorcycle road racer will star in his version of a motocross thrill show.
In keeping with the Slack tradition of bringing in big names, NASCAR’s Kenny Schrader will be in a late model for the APC race, along with established Ontario stock car drivers like Pete Shepherd III and Jason Hathaway and the young, hot, NASCAR Pinty’s Series racer from Quebec, Alex Labbe.
“Brandon Watson is coming, too,” Nagy added, “and four or five guys from Michigan and Indiana. There’s big buzz about this, and it’s evolved into a huge racing event. We’ve got 400 campsites pre-booked (of 1,100 available).”
Nagy said that when he was hired, there was a ton of work to do and he didn’t want to put the facility in “a bad spot” by booking a race weekend and then discovering they weren’t ready for it.
“I’d have been just as happy,” he said, “to not have a race in 2017, to make sure we were set. But when I was contacted by APC about a show in late August, my antenna went up and I thought it was late enough in the year that we would be ready and it would allow us to get one big event under our feet, do it the right way and learn from it, and be ready to take a serious look at scheduling for 2018.
“As well, those guys have the best thing going as a series in our province and maybe in our country. They’ve got a ton of talent and they keep it fairly simple. It’s an Ontario-based series, so travel is still expensive but you’re not going across the country. We had an open test for them last Sunday and we had 36 cars here and not everybody came. The probably have 43 cars on the docket.”
Because of uncertainty surrounding auto-racing promotion at Kawartha Speedway near Peterborough, the final NASCAR Pinty’s Series race was moved to Jukasa and will be held there on Sept. 23. After that, planning for a road course will begin. Norris McDonald