Supermotard racers descended on Greenwood’s Route 3 race track for two days of races and music last weekend.
The small track is the brainchild of city residents Angus MacNeil and his wife Dale Robins, who petitioned city council last year for a licence of occupation to a patch of asphalt and dirt on Highway 3, west of Nikkei Park.
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“This has been an overwhelming success,” MacNeil told The Times Sunday, Sept. 26. It was day two of Route 3 Racing Club’s Motard and Music Festival and the air was thick with the sounds of revving engines and screaming spectators.
Fans had come to see racers like Anaconda’s Casper Henry, Regina, Sask’s Robyn Ham and six-year-old Martina Cardenas of Coquitlam, possibly the cutest human ever to ride on two wheels.
MacNeil said he’d pushed for the racetrack as much for his love of motorcycle racing as for his hopes that the space would be used in the off-season for other outdoor sports. Throw up some ramps and, boom: You’d have a BMX track or a skateboard park, he said. Flood it in the winter, and you’d have an ice rink.
“I don’t care what they do with it — as long as they don’t hurt it,” he said, adding that the track’s licence of occupation runs through the end of 2023.
Stressing that neither the track nor the festival would have gone ahead without his wife and the likes of Greenwood’s Brian “Flathead” Smith and Jeff Fraser, MacNeil went on to explain that Route 3 Racing Club is a registered non-profit society.
“No one’s making a dime off this,” he said.
Having taken out a comprehensive liability insurance policy, Route 3 has invited to share the track with the Greenwood Activities Abound Society, whose GoldRush Speedway was recently closed across the highway.
This weekend marks the track’s grand opening, as well as its last hurrah before next summer, when MacNeil said Route 3 hopes to put on races for Greenwood’s 125th Founder’s Day celebration.
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