MOUNTAIN VIEW COUNTY – After narrowly dodging the proverbial bullet when the powerful Canada Day twister tore through a portion of Mountain View County, the new Carstairs-area race track’s management decided to organize a fundraiser to support those in the community who were not quite so fortunate.
“Where we are located, the tornado missed us by about two, two-and-a-half kilometres,” Dominic Young, president of the Rocky Mountain Motorsports race track near Carstairs, said during a phone interview.
“And that’s a good thing because it would have been pretty disastrous,” Young told the Albertan. “We had a motorcycle track day happening at the race track and that would have been a lot of trailers that would have been twisted and messed up, and we had a lot of people out there that would have had to have found some shelter.”
Because the raceway’s owners and membership feel a close kinship with the community that compels them to be involved where they can – and having themselves just narrowly avoided disaster – the decision was ultimately made to pitch in and help those whose properties were either completely destroyed or substantially damaged.
“We very much see ourselves as part of the community, and we wanted to see what we could do to raise some funds for the people that did get impacted by the tornado,” he said.
Although certain details were still in the process of being finalized when Young spoke with the Albertan, he said the date and location was set for Saturday, July 22 at the raceway.
“We want to have a community open house day,” he said.
“We will have some of our members there who will be happy to give people a tour of the track at some speed; not top speed, but allow people to experience the track and see the facility,” he said.
“There’s a large part of the community that is barely aware that we exist.”
Along the way, he said people who come out to experience the track and visit the facility will also be invited to donate to the fundraiser.
“All the proceeds will go to the funds that are being aggregated for the victims,” he said.
And leading up to the July 22 fundraising event, Young said the raceway will also be soliciting further contributions from different groups that come out to use the track.
“We’ll be asking them if they would like to make a donation to the fund,” he said, adding the raceway’s membership will also be asked to pitch in.
“I can’t say that we’ve established a target in terms of what we’d like to raise,” he said. “But I’m certainly hoping that we’ll be in the tens of thousands of dollars.”
Asked how the funds will be managed and allocated to those in need, he said, “we’ll collect the funds directly in our accounts and then we’ll make a lump sum contribution” to a bank account that was set up to administer the monies raised.
“The purpose really is to see if we can, as part of the community, make a bit of a contribution and help people out that didn’t manage to dodge the bullet,” he said.
