Dereck Lynch speaking at historical society as well as pics Lynch provided showing highlights of his career

Guest Speaker at Hastings Historical Society Meeting

“It was a very humbling call to get (saying he had been selected for induction).” Derek Lynch

Article by John Campbell

Hastings - Fri., Feb. 24, 2023 - Ernest Hemingway once said “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

Derek Lynch chose motor racing, starting when he was a teenager racing go-karts in Eastern Ontario where he won four championships.

He went on to race and fabricate stock cars for a living and he was so good at it that this Saturday the Trent Hills resident will be inducted into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame (CMHF) as a competitor, builder and significant contributor.

“It was a very humbling call to get (saying he had been selected for induction),” Lynch said in a presentation to the Hastings Historical Society this month at the Hastings Civic Centre. It was an honour he didn’t earn on his own, he said.
“I accepted it on the shoulders of a lot of people” — friends and family who had helped him over the years — “because you can’t do this alone, it’s just impossible.”

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CMHF provides a brief history of Lynch on its website (https://cmhf.ca) explaining why he’s being inducted into the hall Feb. 25 along with 11 other individuals:
“In 1986, at 14-years-old, he made the jump to Late Model Sportsman racing at Peterborough Speedway, where he won five features and the track championship in 1987.”

“Lynch raced in the ACT Pro Stock Series from 1988 to 1995, where he recorded a pair of top-five points finishes and three wins, including a victory in the prestigious Oxford 250. Away from the driver’s seat, he worked as a fabricator for NASCAR Cup Series and NASCAR Truck Series teams in the late 1990s, including Darrell Waltrip Motorsports and Bobby Allison Motorsports.”
“Lynch raced in a variety of late model series over the last two decades. He made 30 starts in the NASCAR Pinty’s Series between 2007 and 2016, winning at Cayuga Speedway in 2007. He also worked as manager/promoter of Kawartha Speedway from 2004 to 2012.”

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“It’s been a great career,” said Lynch, who, at age 51, now races only occasionally, focusing instead on two businesses that he and his wife, Cait, own and operate, involving portable toilets and self-storage units.

Most of the tracks he raced on were paved oval, anywhere from a quarter-mile to a mile in length.
When he began racing at age 14 and started winning, “it was kinda cool,” because “the big joke” was he was too young to have a driver’s licence and couldn’t drive to the racetrack, “but sometimes it didn’t sit well with some of the other competitors who were in their late 20s, early 30s,” he said.
“It got the ball rolling,” though, and “us off to the races, so to speak,” he added.

Lynch said managing the Kawartha Speedway was “a great experience,” and he takes pride in having “changed the bar” for local short-track racing in the nine years he was there.
“What we focused on was the fact that it was entertainment,” and, as with any other kind of event, be it a hockey game or rock concert, “people don’t want to sit somewhere all night long, they just get bored,” he said.

The program was tightened, which “people really began to appreciate,” and “a lot of race tracks in the area (now) follow the same model,” Lynch said. “That feels pretty good that we instituted that.”
While manager, he also installed a permanent hill for soapbox racing and a go-kart track, to serve as avenues for young people to get involved in racing and to “keep the costs down in order for them to be able to take part.”

Derek Lynch

Lynch thanked his father for the path he chose. Dave Lynch raced stock cars from the mid-1960s to the early ’80s but his son didn’t seem destined to follow in his father’s footsteps when he was a young boy.
“I don’t think anybody thought I was going to be much of a racer at the time,” he recalled; whenever “dad would start the race car in the shop I would run up to the house to mom (because) I thought it was too loud.”

The car that made all the racket Lynch “found sitting on top of an old combine in Port Hope about three years ago.” He took it home to restore.
“My goal is to make it identical to the way it was when (his dad) last raced it, in 1983,” Lynch said.

Asked how much stock car racing has changed over the years, Lynch said the “biggest changes” have to do with making the sport safer, particularly in the area of seats and restraint systems.
Also, “there are way more young ladies involved,” which sponsors like “because they can get their product brand out to a whole different audience.”

He lamented the rules have changed so much, with the focus being on parity, that “a lot of the cars look the same, which is a problem. I do think some of the creativity has been lost. Nobody can have an aerodynamic advantage, so we all have to run the same similar style of body. … There are very few areas of creativity left.”

Lynch, who was raised in Norwood and now resides in Brickley, touched briefly on the “very deep roots” his family has in Hastings, with a history of owning local businesses going back more than a hundred years.