Ron St. Clair’s childhood broadcasting ambitions revolved around the chill of arena ice and hockey pucks, not the smell of burning rubber or the sound of revving engines.
He wanted to be the next Foster Hewitt and would lay awake at night listening to the legendary Hockey Night in Canada play-by-play announcer turn words into mental images of hip checks and breakaway saves for the young St. Clair.
He was already on his way to a career in the arena broadcast booth track when he took an exit off-ramp that led directly to Delaware Speedway. Nearly four decades later, St. Clair has found his place in the Canadian Motorsports Hall of Fame as one of the 15 inductees into the 2020 class announced on Thursday.
“It was something I never chased, I was pursuing a career in hockey and the motorsport thing fell into my lap, back in 1982, and I just took the bull by the horn and ran with it,” said St. Clair. “I had so much passion for motorsports, as much as I did for hockey, that one crossed over to the other and my work ethic was the same for both sports.
“I was in the right place at the right time and had some good people along with me and was on the ground floor of a national tour and parlayed into a successful career. In those days I did all that solo and there was no electronic scoring and you had to be focused like a laser beam.”
Born in St. Marys, Ont., St. Clair was raised in nearby London, which had two stock car tracks – Nilestown and Delaware - where his love for speed took hold at age 12 when his dad first took him to the races. St. Clair first broke into the stock car world professionally in 1982 in Saskatoon and six years later he was back home as the announcer at Delaware Speedway, just as the Canadian Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (CASCAR) series was being formed by London-based businessman Tony Novotny.
St. Clair’s flair for calling motorsport races took him to more than 50 stock car and drag racing tracks in Canada and the U.S. and he became an in-demand commodity. His play-by-play and colour commentary coverage of CASCAR and later, the NASCAR Canada series, on the Eastern Canadian and national tours was packaged for weekly broadcasts on TSN, Sportsnet and Speedvision in the mid-1990s.
“That was fun because it made me look like a genius,” he said. “I would announce a race, say in Calgary one weekend, fly back to Prince George, then fly back to Toronto the following weekend and re-announce the edited version for TV. Of course by then I would already know what had happened and had a chance to talk to the drivers (to predict) ‘oh it looks like he’s going to blow a motor here.’”
The CASCAR Super Series became the support series of the high-profile Indy Series races in Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto.
St. Clair, 62, a former junior hockey goaltender, provided play-by-play radio broadcasts for London Knights (1989-94) and Kingston Frontenacs (1994-2001) and moved from Vernon to Prince George in 2003 to become the voice of the Prince George Cougars for seven seasons (2003-10).
He co-founded the CASCAR West series in 1994, which raced at PGARA Speedway in Prince George, and also participated in regional late-model stock car series in B.C. and Alberta, calling WESCAR and ARCA races.
The Canadian Motorsports Hall of Fame is based in Toronto.
St. Clair is now part of the hall’s builder/contributor category, among 285 names who have been given their place of honour. This year’s list includes race car drivers Jim Bray, Danny Burritt, Kevin Dowler,. Louis-Philippe Dumoulin, Alex Nagy, Steve Robblee, Kenny Wilden and Nathalie Richard.
Sprint car racer Cliff Hucul of Prince George, a three-time Indianapolis 500 qualifier in the 1970’s who finished 11th in the USAC Championship Car season points standings in 1979 who posted years of dominant results in the Canadian American Racing Association sprint car series, was nominated for inclusion in the hall this year but not make the list of inductees announced on Thursday.
