Merritt Mud Race

Story by Chrissy Biddlecombe, Photos by Fat Kid Photography – Jeff Allen

A few years ago, some telephone conversations began with Claude Lelievre the owner of the lands where the Merritt Mountain Music Festival had taken place. “Claude”, Dave started out, “how would you feel about renting us some of your land so that we can host a North West Mud Racing Association, ‘Merritt Mud Race’ ”.  After explaining what mud racing is all about Claude was very interested. It took a bit of organizing with City officials and the powers that be, in order to make sure that we could do this and do it right.

The date was set for June 30 & July 1st - and that’s when the real work started. When Dave, Gavin (our President) and myself, first went to look at the site in Merritt we pulled up to the area that was originally known as the infamous “Campground C”.

It was so quiet and peaceful with just a herd of horses grazing in the field. Little did they know that we were about to bring a lot more horsepower to this field.  After making some initial measurements and doing a site layout, we called our club members and got down to business. They stepped up to the plate and volunteered not only their time but their heavy equipment, allowing us to engineer and dig the mud pits for our event as well as build irrigation systems, safety barriers, create a fire plan, set up advertising and more.  The pits are 200 ft long, set-up side by side, with a starting, staging and shut down area.

You may think that we just dig a couple of troughs and go racing but it is far more involved than that. The pits are dug to a certain depth to maintain consistency for the racers and there are certain safety standards that need to be maintained; not only the racers, but more importantly for our spectators.

There is also the underground wiring that needs to be dealt with in order to run our digital timing system, which times down to the thousandths of a second. With the pits ready, we begin to lay out the site for our drivers pit, camping area and set out an area for spectators viewing and parking. By now everyone is exhausted, but the racing has yet to begin. 

Friday night arrives sooner that we would have liked. We pull into the race site to start setting up and ask ourselves, are we ready for this? Is Merritt ready for this? Will we have enough spectators to justify having the race? Will everyone enjoy themselves? Will mother nature be kind to us and keep the rain at bay?

Well I am pleased to say that as the official club worrywart, (and secretary/treasurer) Merritt was a great success. We had hundreds of happy spectators and a ton of amazing passes from our participants. There were some killer wheelies that had the crowd on their feet cheering their hearts out. We can see the huge potential of this race site and we look forward to making the Merritt Mud Race an annual event for our club. We would like to thank the City of Merritt for their generous assistance with our first event in their fine city and all the businesses that allowed us to put up posters and helped to promote us. Thanks also to the local radio stations, newspapers and of course a huge thank you to all the spectators that came out to the races. We sincerely hope you all enjoyed yourselves and we can’t wait to come back next year and do it all over again even bigger and better. We also want to thank all our members who put in so much effort in transforming the area into a fantastic new site for racing.

Merritt was just race one of five in our Amix Cup Point Series. Race number two was in Quesnel during Billy Barker Days and is always a party (yee haw). Valemount is our East West Challenge match with our Alberta brothers and sisters (from the CMRO) on Aug 4th and 5th. Followed by our biggest and highest profile event of each year, the Chilliwack Mud Drags on Aug 18th and 19th at the Chilliwack Heritage Park.  Finally our season wrap up is the 100 Mile House race on the Labor Day Long Weekend. See you in the trenches!

Contact us at: www.nwmra.com or check us out on Facebook