SMB: Canadian Racing Update

Hello everybody, and welcome back to another edition of Steve’s Motorsports Blog!

This is a quick update regarding the Canadian racing landscape. The news dropped earlier last month that the FEL Sportscar Championship will “pause” its 2025 racing season, due to a lack of entries. Let’s take a bit of a deep dive and see what this could mean moving forward.

On April 18th, FEL Motorsports put out a statement saying that they will pause the SCCC for the 2025 season, but will continue the Radical Cup Canada series due to insufficient entries. They also site potential entrants being at the mercy of the current Canada-USA trade war, and all the tariff and general uncertainty that is bringing to the table.

This is a shame, and it seems to be a product of running the GT4 and TCR homologated cars. However, there has been writing on the wall since last fall. FEL announced last November that they were going to add the GT3 Cup Class alongside GT4/TCR/TCA classes, and discounted Gen1 TCR entries for every current generation TCR entry for the 2025 season.

This is in addition to several entries moving up to run in the IMSA Michelin Pilot Cup Series and the SRO TCR and GT4 series.

Seeing as Super Production and Nissan Sentra Cup series are running ahead as normal, which run cheaper cars, this doesn’t look like a wide-spread issue, and perhaps contained to the FEL SCCC.

Without getting into political commentary, I think this was the best thing to do, if the stated reason is legitimate. The racing hasn’t been a problem, and the grids were mediocre last year (9/3/5 for TCR/GT4/TCA), but admittedly down from 2023 (13/4/4).

Nothing looks worse than running a series with a handful of cars, but we’ll see what happens later in the year. If the trade war ends amicably, we could possibly see racing in this series resume in the latter half of the year or next year.

However, since there have been signs of trouble before this, perhaps I wouldn’t hold my breath for 2025 or even 2026. If it goes a step further and the SCCC is cancelled, it would be a blow to the Canadian premier racing scene.

SCCC effectively replaced the shambolic CTCC after years of mismanagement and dwindling entries, but there isn’t anything else like it in Canada. I’ve written in the past about how it’s difficult to have Motorsport be sustainable in Canada and that there has to be some level of support externally to make it happen.

It seems clear now that we can’t have a sustainable regional top tier touring and GT class series run purely within Canada. I think the SRO needs to step up and bring their series back north for a round or two swing and that should mostly satisfy the fans up here.

Alternatively, you could have a series that runs in Canada and the rust-belt & North-East US states. Tracks like Mid-Ohio, Lime Rock, Road America and Watkins Glen could be appetizing for Rust Belt area racing teams. That way the Canadian fans get what they want and can be propped up by US teams that would have lessened travel costs than major teams from further south.

Whatever the case, we will have to wait for what happens next.

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