It’s been a while since I last posted (May 2019), and I just wanted to share with you all my reasons for this. I also wanted to say that I plan on getting back into the groove of things this year and hopefully continue on for the foreseeable future.
I’ll lead things off with saying that I have had a lot of things happen in my personal life over the last 3.5yrs since I’ve last posted. This has only attributed to about half of the reasons, which I’ll cover in detail a little later.
Firstly, and most significantly, the COVID-19 pandemic royally screwed with my ability to get new content starting in 2020. Based on the fact that there were hardly any racing events going on in the first half of the year, there wasn’t all that much to talk about. However, as racing series started getting back online, I could have continued with covering those series that I enjoy. The issue with this was that I was not able to spend enough time with loved ones during lockdown and I was very busy with my day job during the week, so I just couldn’t find the time on the weekends to do this, when the lockdowns started lifting (in Ontario, we had several).
As 2020 closed and 2021 began, although the pandemic was starting to wind down, I still was not able to go to the track to take photos and cover content like I had been able to do in years past. This was because the Canadian governments closed off all racing venues to spectators until very late into the 2021 racing season (after labour day weekend, if I recall correctly). I felt that rehashing the same photos in my blog posts was unsatisfactory to me and so I waited patiently until I get new photos.
It was this period that was the main reason why I didn’t really write anything here during the pandemic. However, as I mentioned, I had a lot of personal life events that affected my ability to write here as well.
The first event I’ll mention, is that in July 2021, I asked the love of my life to be my beloved wife! After we had a moment to celebrate, we had to start planning a wedding! We wanted to get married after the pandemic so we could let our large families be able to attend. So we thought that we had some breathing room to plan things out. Oh man, was I wrong. We went on a tear signing up our wedding venue and vendors over the course of a few months in the fall of 2021 despite wanting to get married in 2023. After signing them up, we had to take the time having to meet with them to coordinate how we wanted our wedding to go.
It was during this relatively happy time, that I went through a lot of hardship. In April 2022, we lost my grandmother, who I loved spending time watching Formula 1 and NASCAR races with as a kid, during my summers at the family cottage. We’d talk motorsports all the time, and I do miss that about her. To add to this, this was just weeks after my grandmother-in-law passed away from Alzheimer’s. She was a lovely person, and I wish I could have met her sooner so I could have known her real self.
It the fall of 2021, my mother’s health started declining, and very rapidly. For some background, my mother was diagnosed with NET (pancreas, liver, kidney area) cancer back in 2015. Her prognosis at the time was a 10yr survival rate of about 30%. We thought things were going “ok” for quite a while; her cancer was not aggressive and for the most part was receptive to her treatments. Even so, her health slowly faded over time. In the fall of 2021, she started having significant problems that affected her daily life and we didn’t really fully comprehend what was happening until much later. In hindsight, it was at this point that her liver and kidneys were starting to fail. She spent the rest of her life in and out of hospital until she passed away at age 58 in August 2022. It was during this time, that even though the pandemic rules were dropped and I could go to the race track, I was spending a lot of time visiting my Mom in the hospital and supporting my family during this difficult time.
Needless to say, it has been a heck of a roller coaster for me since the onset of the pandemic. With the highs of planning a wedding and the lows of Covid-era Canada and the loss of one of the most special people in my life, I just didn’t have the mental capacity or time to write things.
This brings us to today: There are only a few months until the wedding and so after we’ve settled into our newlywed life, I will have lots more time for this blog. I’ll be writing more, going to the race track to take photos, take in the scenes and hopefully get on the track myself in some capacity. There are also a lot of things I want to discuss and cover coming up this year and the next few years.
Watching Daytona 24hr this January is getting me really excited for when IMSA comes to town in this summer. With the Hypercar/LMDH regulations now in full swing, I have a strong feeling we are getting into a new golden-era of sportscars.
I’ll conclude that the racing landscape in Canada has also changed since the “before times*” [Covid]: World Challenge no longer comes North, and unsurprisingly CTCC finally died, although the way it happened was a surprise. This was replaced by the FEL Sportscar Championship. With these differences, the series that I can cover with original photos are going to be different.
I have plans coming in the next year to two that could allow me to cover some different venues and series, so I will keep you all posted in the months to come!
Thank you all for all your support and I look forward to getting back in the swing of things here at Steve’s Motorsports Blog.
*As a note; Jalopnik writers came up with that term, and I love it, so I’m going to use it myself.
Steve's Motorsport Blog 
Hello Everybody, and welcome back to my blog!
It’s been a while since I last posted (May 2019), and I just wanted to share with you all my reasons for this. I also wanted to say that I plan on getting back into the groove of things this year and hopefully continue on for the foreseeable future.
I’ll lead things off with saying that I have had a lot of things happen in my personal life over the last 3.5yrs since I’ve last posted. This has only attributed to about half of the reasons, which I’ll cover in detail a little later.
Firstly, and most significantly, the COVID-19 pandemic royally screwed with my ability to get new content starting in 2020. Based on the fact that there were hardly any racing events going on in the first half of the year, there wasn’t all that much to talk about. However, as racing series started getting back online, I could have continued with covering those series that I enjoy. The issue with this was that I was not able to spend enough time with loved ones during lockdown and I was very busy with my day job during the week, so I just couldn’t find the time on the weekends to do this, when the lockdowns started lifting (in Ontario, we had several).
As 2020 closed and 2021 began, although the pandemic was starting to wind down, I still was not able to go to the track to take photos and cover content like I had been able to do in years past. This was because the Canadian governments closed off all racing venues to spectators until very late into the 2021 racing season (after labour day weekend, if I recall correctly). I felt that rehashing the same photos in my blog posts was unsatisfactory to me and so I waited patiently until I get new photos.
It was this period that was the main reason why I didn’t really write anything here during the pandemic. However, as I mentioned, I had a lot of personal life events that affected my ability to write here as well.
The first event I’ll mention, is that in July 2021, I asked the love of my life to be my beloved wife! After we had a moment to celebrate, we had to start planning a wedding! We wanted to get married after the pandemic so we could let our large families be able to attend. So we thought that we had some breathing room to plan things out. Oh man, was I wrong. We went on a tear signing up our wedding venue and vendors over the course of a few months in the fall of 2021 despite wanting to get married in 2023. After signing them up, we had to take the time having to meet with them to coordinate how we wanted our wedding to go.
It was during this relatively happy time, that I went through a lot of hardship. In April 2022, we lost my grandmother, who I loved spending time watching Formula 1 and NASCAR races with as a kid, during my summers at the family cottage. We’d talk motorsports all the time, and I do miss that about her. To add to this, this was just weeks after my grandmother-in-law passed away from Alzheimer’s. She was a lovely person, and I wish I could have met her sooner so I could have known her real self.
It the fall of 2021, my mother’s health started declining, and very rapidly. For some background, my mother was diagnosed with NET (pancreas, liver, kidney area) cancer back in 2015. Her prognosis at the time was a 10yr survival rate of about 30%. We thought things were going “ok” for quite a while; her cancer was not aggressive and for the most part was receptive to her treatments. Even so, her health slowly faded over time. In the fall of 2021, she started having significant problems that affected her daily life and we didn’t really fully comprehend what was happening until much later. In hindsight, it was at this point that her liver and kidneys were starting to fail. She spent the rest of her life in and out of hospital until she passed away at age 58 in August 2022. It was during this time, that even though the pandemic rules were dropped and I could go to the race track, I was spending a lot of time visiting my Mom in the hospital and supporting my family during this difficult time.
Needless to say, it has been a heck of a roller coaster for me since the onset of the pandemic. With the highs of planning a wedding and the lows of Covid-era Canada and the loss of one of the most special people in my life, I just didn’t have the mental capacity or time to write things.
This brings us to today: There are only a few months until the wedding and so after we’ve settled into our newlywed life, I will have lots more time for this blog. I’ll be writing more, going to the race track to take photos, take in the scenes and hopefully get on the track myself in some capacity. There are also a lot of things I want to discuss and cover coming up this year and the next few years.
Watching Daytona 24hr this January is getting me really excited for when IMSA comes to town in this summer. With the Hypercar/LMDH regulations now in full swing, I have a strong feeling we are getting into a new golden-era of sportscars.
I’ll conclude that the racing landscape in Canada has also changed since the “before times*” [Covid]: World Challenge no longer comes North, and unsurprisingly CTCC finally died, although the way it happened was a surprise. This was replaced by the FEL Sportscar Championship. With these differences, the series that I can cover with original photos are going to be different.
I have plans coming in the next year to two that could allow me to cover some different venues and series, so I will keep you all posted in the months to come!
Thank you all for all your support and I look forward to getting back in the swing of things here at Steve’s Motorsports Blog.
*As a note; Jalopnik writers came up with that term, and I love it, so I’m going to use it myself.
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