Switching fast lanes: East Van race driver one of the lucky few to make a living behind the wheel
Credit to Author: Gordon McIntyre| Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2019 21:40:00 +0000
NEAR OLIVER B.C. — The G-forces are wild and the course at Area 27 Motorsports Park flits by in the blink of an eye.
Turns are dived into at 194 kilometres an hour before a late brake, then the McLaren 600LT takes a couple of seconds to go from 80 to 240 on the straightaway.
Your legs, you realize, are pressing the floorboard as hard as possible as the car zips around the rolling, 4.83-km track and its 16 turns.
“The trick is to stay relaxed,” driver Michael Valiante says as we continue to zig and zag at speed.
He’d know. Valiante was a successful race car driver for 20 years before a debilitating concussion almost four years ago forced him to retire.
“In 20 years of motorsports I’ve had crashes, had a few concussions, but this one was so bad and it took so long to get over,” he says.
Every once in a while someone asks me “what happened to Michael Valiante?” Motorsport had fallen off the radar after the Vancouver Indy left town in 2004 and so had Valiante in the local sports sections.
“I guess I settled,” he’d told me a week previous as we drove to a photo shoot with the car at the Kits boat launch. I ask him what he meant about settling. For second best?
No. For something different.
Professional race car driver and instructor Michael Valiante with a McLaren 600LT at Vanier Park.
The East Van kid I began covering when he was a teen is about to turn 40 and I jumped at his offer to drive me around the Area 27 track off Nk’Mip Road a few minutes out of Oliver and find out what he’d been up to since the Vancouver Indy waved its final checkered flag 15 years ago.
“It was disappointing to see it disappear,” he said, especially for a local kid like him.
A ban on tobacco advertising meant Player’s, who had developed drivers from Villeneuve to Indycar champion Paul Tracy to the late Greg Moore of Maple Ridge, pulled out just as Valiante was ready to assume the mantle of the next Canadian open-wheel hotshot.
When he did get an offer for his first IndyCar race, at Fontana in California, smoke again tripped him up, this time wildfires that forced the race to be cancelled.
It didn’t help that a civil war broke out between what was officially known as ChampCar and the owner of the Indianapolis Speedway, home to the series’ biggest race by far, the Indy 500. The series split in two and uncertainty and bitterness tainted it for years.
Then there’s the uniqueness of the sport itself: It doesn’t matter how talented a driver you are, if you can’t bring sponsors’ dollars you don’t get a ride. Valiante isn’t sure exactly how much was spent on his behalf through various teams and scholarships (and before that, his parents) just to get him to the pro level.
“Six million, at least,” he said. “It’s not like hockey where, you still need support, but talent is going to take you there. That’s why I consider myself lucky because there are a lot of talented drivers who didn’t have things fall into place or they didn’t have the financial support.”
“So even though my whole career path was open-wheel, I was at the age I had to decide whether I was to have a career in motorsport, go back to school or do something else.”
Well, when one car door slams shut, another opens.
Valiante was quickly recruited by a team for the 24 Hours of Daytona, a series based on the famous French endurance race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. That led to a career in endurance racing.
The difference wasn’t just going from open-wheel to covered-wheels, the whole culture of the driver’s role turns upside down as teams of drivers share the same seat, taking three-hour turns on the track.
“Coming from open-wheel, everything is about you (the driver),” Valiante said during a lunch break at the track. “I mean everything.
“Then you jump into a sports car and you’re sharing the car with four drivers who are all picky, it’s nothing but compromise. At first I thought ‘this isn’t for me.’”
On the track, as we rocketed into yet another corner seemingly far too late only to brake, take the curve with tires squealing and then blast off into a straight once more, I made the shrewd observation that it’s probably a little different doing this in traffic.
“Imagine,” Valiante said, “there’s 80 cars on the track and you’re doing this for three hours at a time.”
It boggles the mind.
Along with his folks and sister, he still runs the family business, Italian Motors. It still has a headquarters in East Van, but has moved operations (and go-karts, which Valiante began racing at seven) just across the border in Sumas.
He once thought he’d be racing at least until he turned 45, but that fateful crash that concussed him — he was slammed into from behind when a driver he’d just lapped failed to brake at the end of a straightaway — that crash that ripped his ribs from their cartilage and damaged his neck and back, that prevented him from doing much of anything for a couple of years, that crash had other ideas.
“The longer you’re not driving, the more you’re forgotten. To think you’ll never drive again after you’ve invested so much …”
Today he’s training young racers and working for Pfaff McLaren Vancouver.
Racing was a glamorous way to make a living, even if Valiante wouldn’t be recognized walking down Commercial Drive by anyone but friends and former classmates. As you get older, the high risk and high injury rate take that glamour away, he said.
“But I still look at it as I was really fortunate. I was one of a handful of Canadians who were able to make it professionally, to make a living out of it and make a good living out of it for 20 years.
“Is it what I wanted to do? No. In my early years I was groomed to go to (IndyCar), but I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of great rides, a lot of great teammates.
“When I look back at it, I’ve had a really good career. No regrets.”