Last summer's wildfire situation in the Cariboo region was an epic disaster, burning wide swaths of forest, destroying property and forcing the evacuation of thousands of people from their homes.
As bad as it was for the area, there was a silver lining in all that chaos for stock car driver Sheldon Mayert. He was still in the hunt for the WESCAR Late Model Touring Series points when his Ford Fusion got punched from behind on the track in Agassiz last July 29 and it crashed nose-first into the cement wall of the infield fence. The damage was extensive, requiring some major reconstruction with less than three weeks to work on it before the next race.
But Mother Nature continued to rage and fortunately for Mayert the Aug. 19 race in Williams Lake was postponed until the fires subsided in September, allowing him to remain in the top three in the points race. He ended the four-race series sitting third.
"It tore the nose right off the car, frame and all, and it was a fair amount of work there," said Mayert. "The guys on the Number 6 team (Keenan Magnant, Keith Towriss, Darwin McConnell, Ed Byl, Mel Foisy and Greg Andres) put in a lot in of effort and got it back together.
"The plus side of the forest fires was the races were delayed and that gave us time. We would have missed one (meet) for sure."
Mayert says he won't be the only Prince George driver on the track tonight when WESCAR kicks off its 2018 season with the PGARA 100. Warren Bergman is also back in the mix, as he was last year for the race at PGARA Speedway. Bergman won the A-heat in P.G. a year ago and got squeezed off the podium, settling for fourth place in the 100-lap feature.
Other drivers expected to race WESCAR tonight are Dave Olson, Trevor Adelman and Jarret Bonn, all of Quesnel; Kane Fraser of Williams Lake; Chris Babcock of Fort St. John; Kendall Thomas and Steve Lengert, both of Kelowna; Trevor Reinhart of Kitimat; and Austin Agonoski of Edmonton, the 2017 WESCAR rookie of the year. Adelman set the WESCAR track record at PGARA last year with a blistering 16.464-second lap in qualifying.
Bob Williams, last year's series champion, won't be back to defend his title. The Prince George driver sold his car and has switched to open-wheel racing. A chance encounter with a friend of a friend in Arizona led to Williams jumping into a sprint car last year, after he'd won his third WESCAR title.
"He took a few laps and fell in love with it," said Mayert. "The story is he'd never been on a dirt track and he'd never been in an open-wheeled car and he did more than respectable the first night. I heard he might have gotten on the podium, so good job on his part."
Williams will be racing in the West Coast Vintage Racers series, which will race in Williams Lake and Quesnel in August. The battled-scarred 33-year-old pavement at PGARA Speedway was deemed too rough for the open-wheelers to venture a bit further north.
Williams won the Prince George race last year, with Mayert second and Thomas third. Thomas ended up second to Williams in the points battle.
The five-event WESCAR series will be back for another points meet at PGARA Speedway - a daytime race on Sunday, July 22 - part of a weekend doubleheader that starts the previous day at Gold Pan Speedway in Quesnel. The series also stops in Agassiz, July 28, and returns to Quesnel for the final meet, Sept. 23.
The WESCAR calendar includes three invitational race dates for WESCAR drivers to consider - the Penticton Invitational, July 7-8; the Williams Lake Invitational, Aug. 25; and the Canada 200 in Victoria, Sept. 1-2. None of them count for WESCAR points.
"We purposely put them on the schedule to try to bring the Late Model Sportsman Class together throughout B.C.," said Mayert.
"We only have so many competitors and so many fans and it's better we work together rather than compete against each other.
"Williams Lake has always been a long supporter of our WESCAR series and this year they want to take a different path and try something different, so that is a non-points event for WESCAR."
Mayert, 50, is one of the original drivers in WESCAR, which started in 2000, and he won the points championship in 2008. The following year WESCAR became the Automobile Racing Club of America (ARCA) West OK Tire Sportsman Series for a four-year affiliation which lasted until 2013, when the American Speed Association took over as the sanctioning body. The series went back to WESCAR in 2015.
This is Mayert's second year as WESCAR president. While car counts are not what they were in the early 2000s when it was not unusual to have 18 or 20 entries crowding the tracks, he says WESCAR is trying to make it easier for new drivers to enter races and he has no reason to doubt the series will continue to survive.
"We lightened up our cars by 50 pounds this year to be on the same page as the other series in Penticton and Victoria," said Mayert.
"Some of the guys are set up to run one series or the other and didn't want to change, so I figured if we were all set up the same it's easier to attend the other events."
Mayert would like to see more street stock racers in the region move up to WESCAR series and the board is doing what it can to make it cheaper to race.
"We're trying to restructure our class to get the cost to compete down," he said.
"There's lots of these cars around B.C. that are for sale and they're really good deals. We've been trying to get the cost of tires, fuel and engines down so that's less of a barrier.
"The big hurdle we see is the adjustability of the cars. In a street stock you're pretty limited in what you can adjust. You get up to these (WESCAR cars) and you can adjust just about everything. You can make it really good or you can make it really bad, fast."
The WESCAR drivers will be on the three-eighths mile oval for practice starting at 1 p.m. Time trials begin at 6 p.m. and racing gets underway at 7.
Tonight also marks the second Prince George Auto Racing Association points meet of the season. PGARA president Jamie Crawford said while the entry-level hornet class is still struggling to attract entries, he's confident car counts will be better tonight than the May meet, with eight street stocks and at least 10 mini stock entries expected.
For the first time in its 66-year history PGARA has title sponsor - Prince George Auto Wrecking - which will help keep the club on solid financial footing. Crawford says the sponsorship is a perfect fit considering how much it helps local racers to reliable source of spare parts to keep them running in the fast lane.
