Occupation: Sales Executive

 

Jim's first taste for competitive racing started with Motocross at 11 years old. He won all of the local "fall fair" amateur races held that first year for the  "under 15" age group. It was hard to convince his only sponsor (his father) to invest any time or money to extend this into a more serious sport.

 

While living in Brampton an indoor go-cart track opened up. He thought that this could be it! He had committed to years of practice to shave every 10th of a second off both the oval and road track. During this time he was involved with a competitive BMX bike racing. Both of these were great for teaching him the importance of patients, endurance, holding and "making a line" on the track.

 

As an adult, fighting for position on highway 401 on the way to work helped ease the need to race. Taking a position at St. Onge Recreation was the void that he needed to feed the need for speed again, selling the vehicles that he grew up on.

 

Barrie Speedway offers a training school in which they teach the fundamentals of oval track racing. He went with some colleagues from work, after throwing the 1300cc Legend Car around for the afternoon he was hooked. Two days later he purchased his first entry level Race Car.

Jim signed up at Barrie Speedway and for the first night he finished 25th! After a couple of heat wins and a lot of race track battles he finished the year in 17th position overall. Not bad for only starting half way through the season.

 

To prepare for the upcoming season he purchased a new car and took on a partner/teacher.  After a complete rebuilt on the car and countless hours on set up and practice, it was race time. The start of the season was great with several heat wins, dash wins and 2 feature wins on the biggest race weekend at the speedway.

 

During the first half of the year we were in the top 10! Our team became envied and revered. During this time an opportunity came up which would allow our team to take the next step into a higher level of race car. These cars were bigger faster and went into the corners hard. The team jumped in with both feet.

 

We were able to compete in 5 feature races finishing better each night out. There were 3 top 10 finishes. With practices on Thursday nights we were able to get better and better. On our last race weekend we were able to run up front and to finish 3rd in the "biggest" race of the year.

 

Jim was able to hold onto his rookie status for the upcoming  2004 season, with the plan of winning the rookie title and the points championship!