Although my involvement in online simulator racing is relatively recent -- late summer, 2001 -- I have been enjoying some form of computer/video driving game since 1984, when I got my first computer. (That first game was called Pit Stop, a cartridge-loaded program for the Commodore 64.) At that time, personal computers were relatively primitive, there were no force-feedback controllers or sophisticated graphics cards, the cars were not much more than coloured profiles and sounded more like electric motors than racing engines. If I wanted something closer in realism to what we have today, it was necessary to go to a video arcade and play Pole Position. (As a point of interest, my strongest competition in Pit Stop was my sister-in-law; she was a natural.... quick to learn, very competitive, and totally unconcerned by the myth that video games were "boys toys"!) These days, anyone who owns a relatively up-to-date computer can participate and enjoy sim racing (as enthusiasts call it) on any level they prefer. Race against computer-controlled (artificial intelligence) cars or go online and race against other like-minded people, just for the fun of it... even for cash prizes and/or trophies, if you're as keen as I am. Wondering what could lead a (so-called) middle-aged man to spend large chunks of spare time and money, playing a computer game? (Serious sim racers really don't think they're playing a game, they think they're really racing each other!) This is how it came to be, in my life....
It almost goes without saying that someone who likes sim racing, also likes real-world car racing. I certainly do! My earliest memories of being a racing fan date back to the late '50s in Ottawa, Ontario, where I went to see the "jalopies" race at a track that ran around the outside of the Ottawa Rough Riders football field at the old Lansdowne Park. If you were there, you'll recall that this track was on the grounds of the Central Canada Exhibition, beside the Rideau Canal, just a few miles from Parliament Hill and practically in the heart of the city! I guess it could have been a quarter-mile track, although I knew nothing of that, at the time. What I saw was '30s and '40s vintage cars, fenders and hoods removed, roaring around this tight little track, bumping and banging into each other, bouncing off the Armco barriers on the outside or careening across the grass on the sidelines of the football field. Hello!! Welcome to short-racing racing!
It was loud and exciting, just the thing for a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy whose heroes of the time were mostly professional football, hockey, and baseball players. Overnight, it seemed, I had become a race fan and soon added names like Fireball Roberts, Junior Johnson and Richard Petty to my list of favourites. Monday morning conversations on the walk to school were now about who'd won the Daytona 500 or the Indianapolis 500; my buddies and I each had our own racing heroes and argued about who was the best driver. It wasn't too long after that, when I was in high school, that the promoters who ran the races at Lansdowne Park were forced to find a new home for their weekly racing events. The new location was to the west of Ottawa, near the farming community of Stittsville, and Capital City Speedway was born. (Today, Capital City is a CASCAR-sanctioned track -- one of the many on the CASCAR Super Series schedule -- and a different generation of local racers competes there.) Oddly enough, the races were held on Wednesday nights during the late spring and summer months, so it was a challenge for a teenager to cover those fifteen miles out into the country, see all the races, hang out in the pits for a while and still get home in time for bed. My father was never much of a racing fan, so he had little interest in taking my younger brother and I to the races. (To this day, whenever the subject of racing comes up around my father, he still can't figure out why and how my brother and I became interested in racing. Read this, Dad, and you'll get the picture!) Somehow, I managed to get to the track, a few times each season, and it was especially fun to wander around the pits, or volunteer to ride in the back of the track cleanup truck, and watch the drivers and crews, working on their cars, some of them openly drinking beer and, occasionally, getting into fights if the action got a little too heated. Like I said, welcome to short-track racing....
Around this same time -- early '60s -- my family would take summer vacations in New England... a couple of weeks in a rented cottage on the New Jersey shore. My father had developed friendships with families in various states around the area, from his association with the Masonic Lodge, and it was a retired New Jersey state police captain and his family whom we joined for those summer holidays. (One of those summers, I got to see my one-and-only pro baseball game at Yankee Stadium, riding in style from New Jersey to the Bronx in a brand-new Lincoln Continental, to see the Yankees play the Baltimore Orioles. Big-time stuff for a youngster from Canada and I'm grateful for the memory!) There were other people to visit around New England, in Boston, Philadelphia and Connecticut. Friends in Connecticut had an older, teenage daughter who took my brother and I under her wing. We'd go with her and her boyfriend, to hang out with the local car enthusiasts or cruise around in the boyfriend's brand-new, red Mustang. By now, I was old enough to drive and couldn't believe my good fortune when the guy let me drive his Mustang almost the first time I ever met him! I was in car heaven! One Saturday afternoon, these generous young people took my brother and I to see a race at a great short track, just across the state line in eastern New York, near Dover Plains, where the featured cars were modified sportsmen. That, too, is a treasured memory of my youth, although, sadly, I no longer recall the name of the track we visited, nor can I find reference to it in current race track directories. If anyone reading this essay, happens to know the track in question, from the mid-'60s era, please leave a note in my mailbox, with whatever info you might have (That teenage girl is now, of course, a mature woman, who happens to live in North Carolina; I've often wondered if she's still a race fan. Great place to be living, if she is!) By comparison to the early racing experiences of kids who grew up during those times, particularly in the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest and Southwest United States, my exposure to racing falls far short of theirs. But, I got enough contact to sow the seeds and develop some roots of my own.
As a young man, my job took me west to British Columbia, where I was able to cultivate those racing roots; Vancouver had a thriving car culture -- partly because of the milder climate, I think -- and I soon met up with people who loved fast cars as much as I did. Most of my friends were 'gearheads' of some kind -- street rods, muscle cars, antiques, or what-have-you, and we were doing what our peers were doing, from coast-to-coast: cruising the streets and going to the drag races on the weekends. Even before leaving Ottawa, I'd bought an old flathead Ford sedan (for $75!) while a high school senior; I had cruised the city streets and backroads in that old car, looking for fun and finding the limits of my driving skills. Now, in Vancouver, there were fast cars all over the place and I did my best to keep up with the crowd, learning about high-performance from my friends. Soon enough, I was able to buy a friend's '65 Olds F-85 coupe; he had found a good deal on a Corvette and needed the cash. My new ride was only a couple of years old -- by far, the hottest car I had owned to that point in my life. This was a factory performance "sleeper" -- Oldsmobile's answer to a Chevelle Malibu or a Pontiac LeMans. It came with a 330 cubic inch, 315 horsepower Rocket motor, Muncie wide-ratio four-speed, bench seats, a radio and a heater/defroster. That's it! No frills, not much chrome other than the bumpers, but bags of power under my right foot. Hi-test gas was still selling for about 35 cents a gallon, in those days, so a ten-dollar-bill could take me cruising all over the Vancouver area with my buddies, on a Friday or Saturday night.