Festival Racing weekend 1

Dino Crescentini in his 1977 Wolf-Dallara - ex-Gilles Villeneuve centre-seat CanAm car.


Hey All, once again, I've been away and very busy so I've not posted in quite a while!
Well, where do I begin? May 10th saw me get out and actually go racing for the first time and things went rather well. Then again more recently, in spite of the costs, last weekend's activities also yielded extraordinary results. As some of you may be aware, I was racing my wee formula car at the 29th VARAC Vintage Racing Festival (June 20th to 23rd) and I must say, as a race team-group, we've probably made about as many mistakes and forward-strides as is possible in one weekend and fortunately, the mistakes only resulted in me looking foolish. - more on that later!

But right up front, I must address the great tragedy that cut this year's 2008 29th Vintage Festival short. This is the info as I have it at present. Please understand this information may not be correct or conclusive, as this is all hear-say (though from reliable and witnessing sources). If I find out different details, I'll post them.
I was amongst the first morning races out in the group 2 race, first off and then, in the third event of the day, during Sunday morning's racing a catastrophe occurred. At highest speed, apparently at the "hump" around the end of the back straight, on the fastest part of the track during the race with the very fast "wings & slicks" cars, disaster. A great sportsman and good friend of VARAC suffered an accident that took his life. Dino Crescentini of Rochester Hills, Michigan crashed fatally in his 1977 Wolf Dallara center-seat CanAm car. Dino was reportedly revived and removed from the accident scene and evacuated to local hospital, but an "addendum driver's meeting" was held at the track at 1:00 pm where race management officials announced the sad news of Dino's death and added that the weekend's further events were to be cancelled in respect to the family of the deceased. As this was a fatal accident, in agreement with Ontario law, the Police were called in and were conducting a detailed investigation. Their investigative results would take longer than the schedule would allow, and as a result, all racing activities for the day were ended. This was agreed to by all the participants and we of the racing fraternity shook hands, shed our tears and packed up for home. Recent reports said the car shed some bodywork and became sideways allowing air underneath and resulting in a "blow-over" that caused the car to flip several times end over end and strike the wall at very high speed, however, exactly why this happened remains unknown at this time. Many theories have been put forth, but we'll just have to await the results of the police investigation and the examinations of the racing technical people.



I'll post my adventures later (I did sort-of? O.K.? ---In spite of it all and before the sad end, we still had great fun though!)

Doug Switzer