The pandemic shut a lot of sports down and when some of the auto racing series in Ontario announced that they’d be back with a reduced schedule, smaller purses, fewer people associated with teams and no spectators at the tracks, Spira Racing decided they’d leave their cars in the garage in Guelph.
“There are probably four or five different reasons that kind of multiplied to the point that, no, we're not going to do all this,” Spira’s owner Ken Spira said.
The team has a stable of five cars for four drivers with two of the cars for Guelph racer Billy Schwartzenburg to drive in the southwestern-Ontario based APC United Pro-Late Model Series. The other drivers and cars are mainly based in single-track series.
“One of the key things that we talked about was that we kind of got into car racing a number of years ago because it was a family thing – not just for our family,” Spira said. “We treat our race team as a family, but the other racers and their crews and everybody, we treat them all as a family. It's like a big family-orientated sport, but you could only take five crew members with you to the race and, of course, we always had a lot more than that.
“There were going to be people like my wife who wouldn't be able to go, the driver's girlfriend wouldn't go, the driver's parents wouldn't go. These are people that we've gone with since we started racing and it just wouldn't feel the same. It's just not right to have these people sit at home and us go and race with no fans in the stands. Not having the family that's always a part of our team just didn't feel right.”
There was also a bit of a problem with getting a proper return for the team’s sponsors.
“I didn't really want to get after our sponsors for a partial season, especially when a lot of them were getting kicked in the teeth with their own businesses and profits and all that stuff,” Spira said. “We didn't want to go there and ask for some money to help support our cause for five races and then not have any real exposure because it was just on the YouTube channel. They were going to film the races, but there wasn't going to be anybody in the grandstands. There was very little bang for your buck for the sponsors.”
And Spira could understand any trepidation sponsors would have as he was going through the same problems as them with his own Spira Fire Protection company.
“We've got 60 per cent of our work force sitting at home,” he said. “For me to sponsor a race car (for a series) that's got no fans instead of giving that money to my employees that are sitting at home to buy groceries just didn't make any sense at all.”
He also couldn’t make it make sense to compete when the purses were also going to be smaller.
“They added that they'd cut the pay in half so you'd only get 50 per cent of your pay. That wasn't a good thing because the expense is the same,” Spira said. “Buying a set of tires is still $800. Buying the fuel is the same. Getting to the track is the same. No. And we're not getting any bang for the buck for our sponsors, that's really not going to fly for us.”
Until the provincial shutdown forced the race series to delay their starts, Spira had planned on their usual schedule. They were to compete at 52 race meetings including 18 meetings with two of their drivers in attendance and another three with three of their cars there.
“We were running kind of the status quo until this COVID fiasco knocked our whole thing all to pieces,” Spira said.
They were also well into the process of getting the cars ready for the season when the shutdown was announced. That led to Spira having a pretty good chuckle the next time he went in the locked shop that’s a short walk from his home and saw all the tools lying around.
“Everything was exactly where we dropped them,” he said. “It was like we were on Route 66 somewhere in Arizona and everybody just walked away. Stuff was still sitting on the carts, things were half done. It was like a ghost town.”
Now the team’s back working on their cars, but there are new rules. Only one crew is allowed in the shop at a time so each gets a dedicated night.
“We could probably open it up a little bit more, but we've got a protocol for everybody and we make sure that everybody follows it,” Spira said. “We've got hand sanitizer. We've got masks. We've got gloves. We all work out of the same massive tool box and we all use the same drills, grinders, tools and equipment and everything. We just thought if we had more than one crew, we'd be falling on top of each other and using different tools.”
So each team has to follow the same rules each time they’re in the shop.
“They take all the tools out they need to work on the car. They get everything they need and they keep everything on a tray, a cart,” Spira said. “At the end of the day, they take the Lysol wipes and they sanitize everything that they had and they put them all back in the toolbox, they put them back in the drawer. They wipe down the grinders. They wipe down all the stuff and then they leave and shut the lights off behind them.”
The time away from competition comes a year after Schwartzenburg finished 10th in the APC standings last year.
“We were first in points after the first five races,” Spira said. “We started off really good last year and then the wheels fell off that bus.”
Those wheels left the bus about the same time they suffered a blown engine in a race at Jukasa Motor Speedway.
“Our mission has been trying to get into the top five -- it was last year and it was again this year,” Spira said. “We really thought we were in a position to have a top five car. We have a top five driver and we thought our program, we were really bringing it together with the APC rules and the late model and what it took by the whole crew to keep the car together and maintained properly and set up properly. We were really getting a handle on all of that stuff with our notes and maintenance and everything else we have to do from track to track.”
Now, of course, they have an entire year to get ready for the 2021 campaign and they’re looking forward to getting the whole gang back together again. And they’re also looking forward to getting together with all their competitors again in what theyl consider a safe situation.
“It's a ton disappointing, like everything,” Spira said. “This whole thing is just a bizarre situation because we're so used to being with everybody all the time. These are our friends. We're all on the same crew and we consider everybody that's involved with the racing family. That's what got me into it in the first place because I saw how, even though you're competitors, if you needed anything personally or with your race car or with your trailer, your truck, whatever the scenario was, all of those people you could count on 110 per cent."It didn't matter if they were your worst enemy at the race track, they were the first one to have your back if something ever happened. We developed that mentality as well which has always been kind of my forte to help people out -- or I certainly try to.
“That was a very big attraction of the whole sport and not to have that because of this whole COVID thing, yeah, it drives you nuts.”
