Paul Tracy’s storied motorsport career, as tempestuous as it has been, is in the process of coming full circle. Later this month, Tracy will be among those being inducted into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame during its 20th annual induction ceremony.
Presented by Canadian Tire, the event will see Tracy return to his hometown of Toronto, the site of two of his biggest race wins. And alongside him on stage will be two of the competitors whose names punctuated, and, in some ways, defined, Tracy’s early career.
He got his start in karts “around the Toronto area, which is really how to race,” he says. Then he moved into formula cars and quickly made a name for himself by becoming, at age 16, the youngest-ever Canadian Formula Ford champion.
Just as quickly, he found the first in a long list of rivals, in Toronto racer Scott Maxwell, who joins Tracy in the 2014 Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame inductee class.
“Scott was my first big head-to-head rival,” Tracy recalls. “We went at it really hard.”
At that time, Maxwell was racing for a Canadian team owner, Brian Stewart.
Several years later, it was Tracy who would race for Stewart as he claimed his career’s next great achievement: a dominant season en route to the 1990 championship in the American Racing Series, the precursor to what’s known today as Indy Lights and the final step on the ladder up to an Indy car ride.
The time had come for Tracy to move into the big leagues. And so, when no opportunities immediately presented themselves, his family wrote a cheque to Indy car team owner Dale Coyne to give Tracy one shot at turning heads, at the Long Beach race in 1991.
The weekend ended with a mechanical failure, but he had done enough; Tracy’s talent caught high-profile attention.
After a late-night, highly secretive meeting in Detroit a few weeks later, he signed with Roger Penske and his career as an Indy car racer was under way.
By the end of the year, Tracy was competing in CART against the likes of Mario and Michael Andretti, Al Unser Sr. and Jr., Rick Mears, Emerson Fittipaldi, and others, during an era remembered by many as the golden age of North American open-wheel racing.
“They were huge international stars in the motorsports world, and then there was me, this kid from Canada,” Tracy remembers with a laugh. “It was fantastic racing, and I learned a ton from all of those guys on how to be a race driver and how to win.”
It was two years later that Tracy hit his stride and the wins began to accumulate, five in 1993, including the first of two on the streets of Exhibition Place in Toronto, a feat he’s still the only Canadian to accomplish.
“Winning in Toronto my first time was a really big win for me,” he recalls. “The series at that time was huge crowds, huge sponsors, an international audience, lots of people watching.”
That year, Nigel Mansell crossed the pond to race in CART. He had just won the Formula 1 World Driving Championship. Tracy had the pace to give Mansell a run — and memorably did several times, including overcoming two cut tires and to claim his first career win over polesitter Mansell at Long Beach that year. But a rash of early DNFs left him with too deep a points deficit to make a serious run at the title despite leading the most laps on the season. Mansell was the eventual victor over Emerson Fittipaldi with Tracy ending the year in third.
(Mansell is also being inducted into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame later this month as this year’s international selection.)
Tracy’s career was nothing short of tumultuous.
There was the race at Phoenix in 1993, two weeks before his victory at Long Beach, when he crashed out while leading by more than two full laps.
Famously, he was fired by Roger Penske — twice — for his outspoken manner. He once wore a blue Mexican wrestling mask with a Quebec flag as a cape to rile up a Montreal crowd.
He had a reputation for being hard on equipment . . . so much so that an off-hand comment he made referring to punting a competitor off the track as giving him “the chrome horn,” earned Tracy the phrase as a nickname.
And then there was the 2002 Indianapolis 500. Tracy made a pass on Helio Castroneves on lap 199 at the same time that a yellow flag came out. The arbitration over which of the two racers should be declared the winner dragged on for months.
Castroneves was eventually awarded the victory, a decision that remains controversial to this day. But Tracy says he doesn’t give it much thought.
“I know in my heart I won the race, but I don’t have the trophy to prove that,” he says. “It is what it is.”
All of his ups and downs, his accolades and frustrations, a CART championship in 2003, two wins at home, 31 Indy car victories, and the never-ending tome of stories inevitably culminate in one question: What took so long for Tracy to be inducted into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame in the first place?
Tracy is not among them.
“I didn’t expect it,” he says. “I thought it would maybe be 10 years down the road. I guess I thought that when you go into a Hall of Fame, you’re retired. I’m still not in that mindset.
“But I’m excited about it. I think it’s cool.”
While he says that he’s done racing open-wheel cars, Tracy does still have the itch to get behind the wheel.
“I’d like to do some endurance racing,” he says. “I think I can still do that pretty well.”
So, it’s possible that The Thrill from West Hill has yet to thrill us for the final time.
But if it turns out that he has, his career has, without any doubt, already been plenty thrilling enough.
