The Chequered Past: Sports Car Racing and Rallying in Canada, 1951 – 1991 (review)

Motor sports racing is a collision of modernity: commerce, nationalism, technology, gender, and a host of other familiar attributes. In examining the development of the sport in the post–Second World War period, David Charters’s The Chequered Past addresses the conflicts that emerged in Canadian car racing between ‘race what ya brung’ amateurism and money-making professionalism, between small-scale hobby and big-ticket spectacle, and between national and regional visions over racing’s evolution. The book largely focuses on the sport itself, the cars, races, rallies, and drivers, and its institutional development. But it also provides some interesting insights into postwar leisure, French–English relations, regional tensions, and the sometimes unhappy sharing of power among international, national, and provincial racing organizations, local clubs, and commercial enterprises.

The book is divided into three main sections, each with five tight chapters. The first part examines the amateur period of Canadian racing, with the emergence of early car clubs and associations, the British influence on the nascent sport, early races and rallying, and the cultural and economic backdrop that facilitated this form of leisure activity. The founding generation of enthusiasts had a vision to promote of Canadians having ‘world class’ status in the sport, and Charters is very good at recreating the spirit that guided these pioneers. He does so with care and detail, laying out these early days in a tone that borders on paean.

The second part of the book looks at the transition from an amateur pursuit to a commercialized, popular, full-fledged sport. Here we see the emergence of new standards, tracks such as Mosport in Ontario, Edmonton International Speedway, and Le Circuit in Quebec, and young Canadian driving stars Peter Ryan, the country’s first Formula One racer (killed in a 1962 race), George Eaton (of the department store fame, another F1 driver), and of course the legendary Gilles Villeneuve. Against this backdrop is the battle over the ongoing commercialization of the sport and its haphazard development in Canada, and Charters is particularly good at detailing the organizational and financial difficulties racing faced in this period.

The third part of the book is about the modern-day spectacle that racing has become. The massive events that accompany Formula One racing or Indy Car racing in Canada, where the races are almost incidental to the money-fuelled festival atmosphere of thousands, contrasts with the still-practised grassroots racing, where amateurs continue to take to rudimentary tracks with their own patched-together cars. This dichotomy, spectacle vs amateur pastime, endures, and Charters’s book gets inside the political and financial machinations that led to such a polarization. The tale ends on a melancholy note with the demise of the Canadian Automobile Sport Clubs, the association that had led and nurtured the sport in Canada since the 1950s, a victim of its own successes in pushing for high-quality, professional racing in Canada.

If there are any quibbles with this useful book, it is that it could have offered a little less, and at the same time a little bit more. The book is narrative-heavy, particularly up to the 1960s, and often dwells on racing minutiae that only a very hard-core enthusiast would appreciate. Yet it seems to zip through the 1970s and 1980s, and only skims over some major events, such as the decline of British influence (and the corresponding increase in us influence) and the emergence of the Toronto and Vancouver Indy races. Moreover, readers would appreciate even more analysis of the implications of car racing’s evolution in Canada, particularly if Charters had used this collision of modernity to refract better the interesting parallels between racing’s federative status, which mirrored the divergent regional, provincial, and continental pressures and tensions facing the country in the period under study. Here, racing could have been a much more effective metaphor for Canadian political and economic development in the postwar period.