By John Hopkins
TORONTO, ON -- The Cape Breton Festival of Speed is not dead yet, according to one of the event organizers, despite a press release from the Canadian Motorcycle Association saying it was withdrawing its sanctioning of the event.
The CMA issued a release last Tuesday saying it was withdrawing its sanctioning for the Sept. 20-24 road race due to, “delays in necessary information being provided to the CMA as a sanctioning body and to the insurer of the event.”
According to the event’s project manager, John Graham, his group had missed a deadline to provide an operations manual to insurer Jones Brown Inc., which was necessary to secure the CMA sanctioning.
In a phone interview on Thursday, Graham told Inside Motorcycles that race director Terry Dale had planned to meet with the Festival of Speed committee in Sydney on the weekend of Feb. 17-19 to finalize the manual, but heavy snowstorms had left him stranded in Ottawa.
Graham said the meeting has now been rescheduled for Mar. 31-Apr. 2, and that Jones Brown has agreed verbally to a new deadline of Apr. 15 to have the manual completed.
“It’s our fault,” Graham admitted. “We didn’t communicate properly to the CMA and the insurance company that we had these delays. The CMA really had no alternative but to issue the release.”
In an interview with Inside Motorcycles last Friday, CMA general manager Marilynn Bastedo said she hadn’t finalized a new deadline schedule with the event organizers and Jones Brown, but didn’t rule out the possibility of the race being saved for 2006.
“When we were first approached about this event we were excited about it,” she said. "We still think it could happen in 2007, and we’re not going to put up a road block to it happening in 2006.”
A key concern, however, is a shrinking time frame to complete the necessary upgrades that will be required for the event to take place, such as repaving sections of highway that will make up the course.
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