Watching cars race through the Saratoga Speedway on Vancouver Island set a Squamish driver on the path to becoming the youngest competitor in the Pemberton Stock Car Association.
Over this weekend, that path led to a reward.
Fourteen-year-old Finn Dallman of Garibaldi Highlands managed to capture silver in the youth division — the rookie hornet class — during the association’s third race of the season.
“It makes me feel pretty good,” he said. “I guess because I’m so young and everyone else is older than me, and I’m beating them.”
Dallman, who was 13 the first time he first laid eyes on the Saratoga track, remembers seeing racers his age or younger jump into the driver’s seat.
“They have 11-year-olds on the track,” he said.
“I went with my family to watch, and I found out how young you can be to drive there, and I was instantly hooked.”
At that point, Dallman decided that he’d take a course at the speedway and learn to get behind the wheel.
“I was drawn to it because everyone else there was around my age, so it wasn’t that intimidating,” he said.
He took a course and competed in a few events at Saratoga, as he was still considered too young to race in any of the mainland tracks.
Dallman’s only been driving for a year, but his interest in cars goes much longer back.
Starting from the age of four, he’d shown an affinity for vehicles. A battery-powered ride-on Jeep was perhaps the first time he hopped behind the steering wheel.
He also amassed a collection of Hot Wheels and model cars.
When he was 10, he was given an old five horsepower Honda engine that he, along with his father and grandfather, turned into a Go Kart.
“Finn still terrorizes neighbours driving it around the circuit he built in his yard,” his family wrote in a news release.
Speaking of terror, Dallman’s racing career does come with some nail-biting moments, at least for his father, Dave.
“It’s always quite nerve-wracking for me to watch it,” he said. “You’re always wondering what’s going to happen.”
The cars often get beaten up quite a bit during the races, Dave said.
Even though there are no-contact rules in his son’s division, the nature of racing in a dirt track means that crashes are an inevitability.
One example is during the recent race.
When Dallman passed a car, it lost control and wound up smashing into Dallman’s vehicle.
“Both the right side doors are completely smashed in,” said Dave.
It wasn’t the only time his son had a rough encounter on the track.
“We’d spent a lot of time during the week fixing Finn’s car because it was damaged at the previous race in Agassiz,” Dave said.
Talking with Dallman, however, it doesn’t seem to be something that phases him. He said that he hopes to advance to higher divisions and pick up a faster car in the future.
“Keep moving up, I guess,” Dallman said.
