Volunteers aim to document all of Canada’s motorsport history

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Mike Nilson has an overwhelming task ahead of him, one that nobody has really attempted before. Taking up roughly 200 square feet of space in his warehouse are 100 boxes filled with old photos, magazines, trophies and motorsport memorabilia. More boxes are coming in all the time, from car clubs and fellow enthusiasts. Nilson’s task is to scan everything, meticulously catalogue it, and upload it to a new online archive.

“It’s a daunting task,” he says. “It’s time-consuming, no question about it, but then again, it’s better than watching TV.”

Nilson and the nearly 20 other volunteers of the Canadian Motorsport Historical Society (CMHS) are working to digitize and preserve the entire history of motorsport in Canada, one document at a time, making it all publicly accessible through their new online archive: Motorsporthistory.ca.

“It’s my personal mission to make sure people like Kay Petre, Peter Ryan and Sam Nordell, that their memories are not forgotten,” says Marcel Chichak, production director for CMHS. Those Canadian racers, and their contributions to the development of motorsport in Canada, are important pieces of Canadian history, he says.

The volunteers of the CMHS are used to racing cars, but this is a race against time. Chichak says much of this history survives only in dusty boxes piled high in people’s garages and basements, as well as in the memories of the people who were there, who raced, or turned a wrench, or watched.

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But as people pass away and many of those dusty old boxes are thrown out, history is being lost.

“Material is disappearing all the time,” says Chichak. The group doesn’t want to see this history forgotten. “Nobody’s ever combined it all into one holistic mass of material for researchers to dive into. Because nobody else was doing it, somebody had to start and it fell to us to start it. It is a Herculean task,” Chichak says. After the documents are scanned, the idea is to return them to their owners.

There are websites documenting a particular old racing series, or a local car club, or a specific period of Canadian motorsport history. But nobody has ever tried to make a complete archive of everything. According to the website, the archive will cover anything that ”has an engine and is raced.”

The volunteers of the CMHS – many of whom have a lifelong connection to motorsport – are being invited to raid peoples’ basements and scrapbooks, and delve into the files of local car clubs and racing leagues across the country.

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In doing so, they’re preserving the stories not just of the famous characters in Canadian motorsport such as Jacques Villeneuve or Paul Tracy, but of the thousands of lesser-known figures, like Toronto-based racecar drivers/builders George and Rudy Fejer, as well as racers like Diana Carter, Horst Kroll, Kay Petre, Sam Nordell, and Gordon Lightfoot. (The Canadian singer-songwriter was an avid go-kart racer, as anyone can see with a quick archive search.)

Digging through the archive, visitors can see old press clippings documenting, for example, the rise of Eldon Rasmussen. He started racing on little bullring tracks in northern Alberta in the early 1950s, building cars in the corner gas station, before eventually making it to the big leagues racing stock cars at the Indianapolis 500. There’s a black-and-white photo of him in the garage with his buddies, rebuilding his racecar, raising their fists to a rival.

Also in the archive is plenty of evidence of rampant sexism in the sport; a MacLean’s magazine cover story from 1966 documented “girl drivers” and “pit popsies.”

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Some visitors come to the archive simply looking for photos of a husband, friend or grandparent who passed away, said Mike Nilson, who not only catalogues everything in the archive, but is also the organization’s secretary.

Since the first document was uploaded to the archive last April, the team has digitized and catalogued over 17,000 items, but they know they’ve barely scratched the surface.

Ed Moody, CMHS past-president and archivist, estimates he alone has about 35 boxes of material to digitize, plus roughly two million photographs on film. “I figure it’ll take me five years to get it done; I’ve been taking my pills because I need five more years,” Moody joked.

The sheer volume of material is daunting and growing every year, which is maybe why nobody has tried to put all of Canada’s motorsport history in one place before.

Long before the CMHS, the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame (CMHF) had become a kind of “dumping ground” where people would send anything racing related – old documents, photos, even cars – says Peter Lockhart, chairman of the CMHF board. “One thing led to another and there were warehouses full of stuff,” he says.

But the Hall of Fame – which has since gone online-only – is meant to celebrate certain individuals and organizations; it isn’t in the business of archiving everything that happened in Canadian motorsport, Lockhart says.

Moody, Chichak, Nilson and the CMHS took up that task. Nobody is getting paid; volunteers contributed hundreds of hours to the project last year.

“It’s a huge task, and the reality is – let’s just say, it’s ambitious. And we’re very happy that they’re taking it on,” Lockhart says.

It may not, ultimately, be important who finished where in the 1963 Trans-Canada Rally or who was runner-up in some local autocross meet. For most people captured in the archive, motor racing was a pastime, something fun to do on weekends. Taken as a whole, however, the archive is a history of people having fun, being foolish and taking risks. It’s a history of time well spent.

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Editor’s note: An earlier photo caption stated a race was taking place in Fort Erie, Ont. in September of 2011. In fact, it was taking place in September of 1911.