Photo Credit: Ashley McCubbin
With a Sunset Speedway Sauble Falls Tent and Trailer Park Championship in hand, Taylor Holdaway is getting set for the next step of his racing career. The Orillia, Ontario native is set to run a partial schedule in the APC Auto Parts United Late Models of Ontario Tour presented by Grisdales.
Holdaway stated discussions started between him and his father, with his father stating if the family-owned team won a championship at Sunset Speedway, they’d venture into Pro Late Model racing.
The year didn’t start out smoothly as the first night didn’t go as planned, with the Holdaway Motorsports driver suffering a broken clutch in the first feature, resulting in not being able to run the second feature. There was no give-up seen, though, as he would come out swinging, posting fourth, fourth, second and third across the next four features. Then on June 19, it seemed the magic was found as Holdaway won the Garry Reynolds Memorial, before going on a tear in weekly competition, stringing off back-to-back wins with ease. As they say, the rest is history.
He would win 12 races and score 21 top-fives en route to winning the championship while finishing third in the NASCAR Whelen All-American Series Division I standings, becoming the first Canadian to do so.
“We had a good year,” he commented. “Last year when we were break out driver of the year, I set our goals and that was to win the championship. We put in a lot of effort of that – my crew – we put in so much work, and I don’t think we ever thought that the NASCAR points would fall like they did, and after our first night, our blemish that we had, we needed to focus on winning races rather than just running well. That’s something that doesn’t happen often.
“I’m not going into this year set on winning 14 races, I can tell you that. But I mean our goal and we’re hard at preparation is to go back-to-back at Sunset. I know all the drivers are working hard to try and knock me off the pedestal, but we’re working hard to make sure that we can go back-to-back.”
As he got near the end of the season with the championship underneath him, Holdaway stated that the team started to look for a car that they could purchase to begin their venture.
“Scott Wylie found us a car and we thought the series was a good series as the first year was really successful so we went down and got a car,” he stated. “We are going to start around in August this year so we’re not running the full deal. The competition level is so stout as you have 14, 15 cars every week that can win, and it’s going to be a good learning curve for us.”
When looking at the competition, he says there is no way that he can name just a couple of drivers that he is looking forward to racing in the series as there’s 10 to 12 drivers every week that could pick up the victory.
The other attraction to the series was the package as “you want to race where you have a fair shot at winning”. Series creator and promotor Luke Ramsay has always stood by the theory in keeping things fair, stating that he wouldn’t tailor any of the rules to just suit a select group of drivers.
“They did a great job of putting the rules together, and they follow the rules so it’s not like if it’s you, you’re going to get through,” Holdaway commented. “They have a rules package and are blunt on it, and it makes it fair. Every driver has a fair shot to win a race. So that’s what attracted us to the series.
“Obviously our goal is to go run a couple CRA races, and to run the Snowflake one year. As of right now, we’re going to get our feet wet and focus on the APC deal and might see us go down to Speedweeks one year or run some CRA races.”
When he starts to get his feet wet in the tour, he says the key is going to making sure he is one of the top-12 qualifiers so he can part of the invert and start near the front of the field. He states being up there is “a bit better racing and you have a lesser chance of getting caught up in the maylays that happen”.
While he knows that he is running the full Sunset Speedway schedule as well as a partial APC schedule for this year, he isn’t sure yet what he’ll do in 2017 and beyond.
“We don’t know what we’re going to do for sure,” he commented. “The Sunset deal with NASCAR – there’s obviously some good money in that when you run well. But like I said the pro late deal, we’re going to do it as we like to race so if we can run 30, 35 races a year, that wouldn’t be a problem for us.”
