Guy Lefebvre has seen the weather forecast that’s calling for rain showers Saturday night and he’s hoping the folks at Evironment Canada are dead-wrong.
Wet racetracks are not conducive to stock car racing and the last thing the Prince George Auto Racing Association needs is another rained-out race day.
Especially not with the Applied Industrial Technologies WESCAR Late Model Touring Series coming to PGARA Speedway this Saturday.
“We’ll be doing our dances tonight,” said Lefebvre.
The first WESCAR race of the season in Prince George happens on the heels of the series season-opener tonight in Williams Lake.
Eighteen WESCAR entries, including those of Prince George drivers Darrell Horwath and Sheldon Mayert and defending points champion Jarrett Bonn of Quesnel, are on the slate coming to the track in Prince George.
The WESCAR dashes, heats and 100-lap main event share the bill with the three PGARA race series – Ron’s Towing hornets, Chieftain Auro Parts ministocks and Canadian Tire street stocks.
All three PGARA classes will have new points champions this year, with the 2024 champs all having moved on.
Streets champion James Bednar, who set a new street stock track record at PGARA last year on Aug. 24 with a 16.868-second lap, has moved onto the Tri-City race series (Quesnel, Williams Lake and Hythe, Alta.).
Ministock champion Spencer Forseth, who also own the Prince George track record (17.151 seconds in 2022) has work commitments which will keep him from racing this year, while hornet champ Corbin Conn has jumped to the street stock class. He’ll be revving it up in the car his dad, PGARA vice-president Aaron Conn, used to race.
The PGARA racers were rained out May 24 and did not get to race the Turgeon Memorial that day.
New to the track this year is a timing system upgrade that sorts out the order or finish and keeps track of points standings. That should take the arithmetic out of keeping track of points to sort out the standings and which row each car starts each race, a job Lefebvre has done for years with the club.
“It will do the points up for us,” said Lefebvre. “It takes the time-ins and automatically sets up all the race lineups for us.”
The new system was partially tested May 24 and a glitch was discovered but Lefevre said before they could fix that the rain came down and the meet was scrapped.
Saturday’s racing starts with time trials at 6 p.m. and racing at 7.
If it gets rained out Saturday the track is available Sunday for a makeup date. If that happens, time trials will be at noon and racing will start at 1 p.m.
Admission at the gate is $20 (adults), $10 (seniors/kids 6-18/mobility impaired) and kids 5-and-under are admitted free.
PGARA Speedway is located north of Prince George Airport at 3645 Highway 16 East.
