My days of blunder

Jim Kenzie

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

It's going to take a while before we learn to call Toronto's summertime street race anything but the Molson Indy.

But all credit to Michael Andretti, who won this race seven times and always counted it among his favourite competitions, for stepping up and resurrecting the event.

It took a one-year hiatus, after the combined schedules of the merged Champ Car and IRL series left no room for it last year.

Andretti and his people secured the rights to the event, and here we are again. All credit, too, to Honda Canada for stepping up as the title sponsor.

Ironically, Honda Canada was maybe the happiest organization anywhere when this year's Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal was cancelled. The parent company had withdrawn its team from Formula One, yet Honda Canada was on the hook for big – very big – bucks as a major sponsor of that event. Where's the marketing advantage of sponsoring a race when your company's team has just withdrawn from the series?

So for a (relative) pittance, Honda gets major exposure for what is now Canada's major motorsport event.

Good on them.

I have raced a few times at this event.

The first time was a hastily arranged seat in a North American Touring Car series race in 1996.

I had received a phone call while I was in Alaska on a press trip from Tom Hnatiw, a friend who is now the host of Dream Car Garage, and was media director for that series.

Ed DeLong, a Toronto-based racer, had purchased two ex-Oreca BMW 320s that raced in the French equivalent of the North American Touring series. He was driving one car, but couldn't find anyone to rent the second. Hnatiw suggested putting me in the car.

"Can he drive?" was the obvious question.

"He has two million readers every week," came the media guy's obvious answer.

I grabbed the quickest connection from Alaska to Toronto, and still missed the first practice session.

So my first time on this track was also in the most powerful car I had ever raced, first time on slicks, first time with a sequential transmission, first time with an ultrasensitive multi-plate racing clutch.

And the labels on all the controls were still in French.

A lot of simultaneous learning curves going on here.

Needless to say, I qualified dead last, but actually got a decent start, pulling alongside the second-last car going into the first corner.

But, I figured, "That's all this poor guy needs – bring his car all the way over from England only to have some stroke journalist take him out in Turn One."

So I backed off and proceeded to have a leisurely drive, going faster than I had ever gone before, and knowing full well that half the people in the seats were thinking, "I could carry that car around the track on my back faster than that guy is driving it!"

About six or seven laps in, another car was approaching from behind. No, I was not yet being lapped; Darren Law, also in a BMW 320, had been in the pits for repairs and was trying to catch up.

I pulled left to let him by, then tried to turn right for the second-last corner of the circuit.

No steering.

"Goodness gracious," I said to myself, approximately.

Then I heard "CLUNK!" as the left front corner fell down.

"Dear me!" I said to myself, again approximately.

Then "WHAM!" as I pounded into the concrete wall. Not having any steering can do that to you.

I thought I had picked up a nail when I pulled left to let Law pass and that caused the left-front tire to go flat (hence no steering) and then the tire to peel off the rim (hence the CLUNK followed by the WHAM).

I also figured that if anyone else did what I had just done, I'd be Ground Zero, so I got the heck out of there.

A safe parking spot was just around that left-hander onto the front straight, so I picked first gear, slowly trundled along, made the left-hander and stopped by the marshal's station.

She came running up to me, laughing her head off, and asking, "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. What's so funny?"

"Didn't you see your wheel?"

"Um, I just got here ..."

Turns out I hadn't got a flat tire – the big nut holding the left front wheel had broken. When I tried to make that right-hander, the wheel stayed right where it was. That's why there was no steering.

Milliseconds later, it parted company with the axle, and the left front brake disc hit the pavement. That was the CLUNK, again followed by the WHAM.

The wheel bounced up off the wall, fortunately not going into the spectator areas, and came down right behind my car. As I trundled to the safe parking spot, the wheel followed me, making a desperate bid to be reunited.

You would have thought that when I turned left into that parking spot the wheel would have continued straight across the track. But somehow it also made the corner, slowly rolled up to the car, bounced off my rear bumper and lay itself down behind me.

The marshal gave me a commendation for bringing in my own debris from a crash.

That race was being broadcast live on ABC's Wide World of Sports, with Paul Page and Danny Sullivan commenting.

They hadn't seen the crash, only the parking job, and from their vantage point couldn't see the damage.

"That's ... " (sound of Page leafing through the media notes trying to find out who was driving car 00) "... Jim Kenzie in his first North American Touring Car race.

"We don't know what the trouble is, Danny, but – wait, maybe this is part of the trouble," as my wheel rolled into frame.

I apologized to DeLong and his sponsor. I felt bad for damaging the car even if the wheel nut breaking was hardly my fault.

"Are you kidding?" one of them exclaimed. "Thirty seconds on Wide World of Sports? And you were stopped? You can drive for us any time!"

They never actually followed up on that offer, but it did illustrate the one truth about motor racing that I can pass on to aspiring racers: If you can't win, crash early in a conspicuous location, preferably in front of TV cameras.

I drove in a few more races here, actually finishing on the podium once (third in class in the Showroom Stock series in a Hyundai Tiburon).

While I'm not racing this time, I am delighted that the Indy is back.

The Molson Indy is dead. Long live the Honda Toronto Indy.

Jim Kenzie is Wheels' chief auto reviewer. He can be reached at jim@jimkenzie.com

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