The Runway Romp Races
By Peter Sheppard
In 1998 I returned from racing in the Manx Grand Prix and was very enthusiastic to follow up a suggestion made by former racer and friend George Pedzinski… ”You have an airport in North Bay, why can’t we race there?
I met with the then Mayor of North Bay Jack Burrows, who genuinely liked the idea, and he introduces me to the airport manager. The Jack Garland Airport was DND run so we needed their permission and consented to following their rules and guidelines that would frame up the event. An agreement was reached, and we compensated the facility with 15% of our gross revenues for each hosted event. We also need a title for the event and my wife Brenda came up with “The Runway Romp”. It stuck.
Once the framework and agreement were in place, I reached out to all my racing and motorcycling friends and built a team to organize the events. The team, later dubbed the North Bay Crew, held monthly meetings all winter to plan for the inaugural event which was scheduled to as the last race of the 1999 season to be held in Mid September; however we quickly realized there would be some major challenges competing at an Airport facility.
Airports areas have no accessible electrical power or water sources, and we were to race on the various taxi ways which most of the time were old concrete. A good friend, Marvin Mosier, worked with me to scope out the track layout. He was a draughtsman at North Bay Hydro and drew up a detailed map of the circuit, parking zones, entrances, location for port a potties, etc.
The track itself would need fences. We quickly realised this would be an expensive and time-consuming task pounding in fence posts only to remove them again after three days. We came up with a brilliant idea and got permission to drill holes around the track perimeter and put in steel tubes which were donated by another former racer, Brent Wood. The tubes were sized to accept regular steel fence posts and simplified the set-up process as the posts easily dropped into place and could be pulled out again after the event. The team solicited from the City of NB and other businesses, snow fencing, steel posts, traffic cones from the City of North Bay and some local businesses, and rented hay bales from local farmers. One strict airport rule was that there was to be no rubbish of any kind left in the area as it may get sucked into aircraft intakes, so we took great care to ensure clean up after each event.
Over the years the event was able to offer several unique things to both racers and spectators including the opening of the event by the local North Bay Mayor, and from local pipe bands in their kilts entertaining in the pits to parades through downtown NB with the racers riding their race bikes there was always a festive atmosphere. We used local motor club members as our marshalling crew; organized track tours for non-racers that enabled them to see what it felt like to ride the track; had a concours competition organized in conjunction with the local CVMG sections and a local helicopter training school offered flights to see the area.
A highlight of the events were tours of Lake Nippissing. These were on board the “Chief Commander” and lasted 2 ½ hours with a fully catered meal for everyone enjoying cruise. We also arranged Saturday evening meals in the mess on the airbase and even had pig roast organized by Dave Mascioli and John Roy, although in hindsight we should have found a bigger pig.
Most of our riders also enjoyed the fact, even though it caused a few delays, private aircraft had to be allowed in an out of a local business located on one of the taxi ways we raced on. Aircraft also continued to take off and land on the main runway not far from our racetrack area.
Our marketing team was in full swing. We wrote articles monthly in local newspapers, sent invites to bike clubs and sent out press releases to local radio and TV stations. We even persuaded COGECO in North Bay to bring TV crews to film whole events. They screened the races on their local community channel but gave the club the master DVD so we could duplicate it and provide a DVD to all the racers who wanted one.
The North Bay Crew ran events in 1999 and 2000, and in 2003 when I became President, we agreed to restart the Runway Romp with the help of Denis Curtis who was the Vice President at the time and Bob Whittleton who was the Technical Chairman. The event ran successfully but we did lose money , never enough riders, so with great ideas from Peter Balen and others in the team we brought more sponsors on board to help pay the bills and persuaded more local businesses to loan us equipment for free. In 2005 Jody Pearce, my good friend and fellow racer, took more of a leadership role for the Romp and did an outstanding job at reducing costs where it eventually made money for the VRRA.
Unfortunately, the last Runway Romp in North Bay was held in 2010. By this time, the City of North Bay owned the airport and wanted more tax money to help pay for its costs. They undertook to plan developments for new factories on parts of the huge airport grounds this affected our ability to hold further events there.
If you ask any racers who came to the Romp most would agree that while not the greatest racing surface, they were fun events.
