Photo Credit: Ashley McCubbin
There are drivers that they can say they won championships.
There are even fewer drivers that can they say won more than five championships.
There are even fewer that can say they have won more than 10.
There is one driver in particular in Canada to can say he has won 31 championships.
In his career of racing the short tracks of Ontario, Tom Walters has scored a total of 31 championships.
This past season, he won three features and scored 12 top fives and 14 top 10s in the 14 features this year to finish second in points.
For his accomplishments across his career, the Ontario veteran was inducted into the Canadian Motorsports Hall of Fame.
Though even with the induction, that didn’t slow him down. He missed day one of Velocity 250 qualifying at Sunset Speedway due to the induction ceremony. He showed up on day two and won the b-main to transfer to the a-main. He started 17th in the main event and worked his way through the field to win the event.
Walters got involved in racing after speaking with somebody on his way home from buying milk.
“I was going out to buy some milk one night and was walking down the street and there was a guy working on his racecar in the garage and I stopped in on my way back, and I’d never been involved in racing or anything or was with anybody, and I stopped on my way back and got talking to him and he says, ‘Do you wanna come on Wednesday night? I could use some help.’ I said, ‘Where do you go?’ and he said, ‘Sunset.” I said, ‘Geez, where’s that?’ and he said, ‘Innisfil’. I said, ‘Geez, my parents have a cottage in Innisfil. I don’t know the race track.’
“So we came up the first Wednesday night, it rained out. Came up the second Wednesday night, it rained out. It rained out three weeks in a row. On the way home after the third rainout, he said ‘I’m selling it. I’m done.’ I said, ‘How much?’ He said, ‘$375′ and I’ve been racing all these years.”
After buying the car, Walters got behind the wheel and hasn’t looked back since as he had success right off the bat.
“I towed the car here on a tow bar and the second race was at Wasaga Beach,” he said. “I actually won my first heat race so that was fun and then my first feature that I won was at Sutton Speedway.”
Since then, Walters has been winning multiple races and championships, including a pair of Autumn Colours Classic wins.
His accomplishments though go beyond solely just the track. At the track, the veteran is seen with young mechanics, helping them learn how to set-up racecars and more. Walters has also helped out many drivers with getting their cars set-up and learning how to be a racecar driver.
So congratulations to Tom Walters on a well-deserving accomplishment.
