The Chequered Past: Sports Car Racing and Rallying in Canada, 1951–1991.

Geoff Cragg is a tenured instructor in the Faculty of Faculty of
Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary in Alberta.

In The Chequered Past, historian David A. Charters presents a scholarly and fascinating look at motorsport in Canada after the Second World War, from the founding of the national association, the Canadian Automobile Sport Clubs (CASC), in 1951 to its demise in 1991. The book is primarily concerned with sports car events, as opposed to stock car or drag racing, because the latter were always professional sports with corporate funding; sports car racing, on the other hand, had its origins as an amateur activity, and CASC was concerned with the development of motorsport for amateurs. Motorsport did not originate in 1951, of course, and Charters provides a brief discussion of earlier motorsport in Canada, but 1951 marks the first attempt to create a formal association that would regulate and encourage amateur motorsport in Canada.

In the introduction, Charters contrasts the first sports car race at Abbotsford airport in 1949 with the Molson Indy Vancouver race 50 years later—an almost polar contrast. The question that he then poses is how and why did the transformation “from sport to spectacle, from subculture to pop culture” occur? The brief answer, which he develops convincingly, is that “the convergence and interaction of two trends—professionalization and commercialization” was responsible for the huge change in Canadian motorsport and the demise of the association that, ironically, encouraged these trends in the attempt to bring motorsport in Canada to international levels of competition.

If it did nothing more than demonstrate the above argument, the book would certainly have solid academic merit, but it deserves a popular as well as a scholarly audience. Charters writes about notable personalities as well as associations, some well-known, such as Gilles Villeneuve, and others less so, such as the brilliant race car designer and builder Bill Sadler, or the talented young driver Peter Ryan, whose death in 1962 delayed Canadian hopes of participating in Formula One racing. An excellent selection of black and white photographs helps to bring distant events and representative moments to life.

For any enthusiast of motorsport, or any sports historian, this is a notable and very readable book.