The Red Shores broadcast team is on the road for a special presentation, as the top drivers in the Atlantic Canadian harness racing industry will converge on Truro Raceway this Friday evening (June 29).
The Bible Hill, N.S. oval will play host to the Atlantic Regional Driving Championship, and P.E.I. is sending a team of four pilots for the eight-driver competition. All of the action will be broadcast live on redshores.ca and will be hosted by Red Shores’ Lee Drake and Peter MacPhee, along with Truro Raceway’s Joe Kelly and Brad McCallum.
The competition will kick off in Race 1 Friday night at the Nova Scotia half-miler with a 6:30 p.m. opening post time. Each driver will compete in Races 1-7 and Race 9 while starting from each post position once on the eight-wide starting gate. The top two point-earning drivers will advance to the National Driving Championship (NDC) in September at Grand River Raceway in Elora, Ont. The winner of NDC will represent Canada in Sweden in the 2019 World Driving Championship. Defending World Driving Champion James MacDonald, a native of Kingston, P.E.I., will also be at the world event in 2019 after having won the championship in 2017 and earning Canada the right to send a second representative.
Drake, manager of marketing, brands and playwise with Red Shores, is excited to be part of the action at the Atlantic Regional Driving Championship Friday night.
“The team at Truro Raceway has put together an outstanding card for the regional qualifier with Red Shores more than happy to help out and host the worldwide broadcast,” Drake said. “The action is sure to be nonstop all evening and hopefully one of the Atlantic representatives will go all the way to the World Driving Championship joining P.E.I.’s own James MacDonald in the top echelon of the sport.”
Drivers in the Atlantic Regional qualified off of 2017 statistics, with the two leading reinsmen on red soil garnering the first invitations. The ‘King’ of Island harness racing, Marc Campbell of Winsloe, will headline the Island team fresh off an O’Brien Award winning season where he smashed nearly every record available to him in Atlantic Canadian harness racing. Stratford resident Jason Hughes has also received the call to attend, as the popular trainer-driver is back in second place at the Red Shores Summerside driving standings thus far in 2018.
Gilles Barrieau is also part of ‘Team P.E.I.’ The New Brunswick driver moves his stable to the Island province during the summer racing season and finds himself continually near the top of the driving standings at Red Shores’ Charlottetown. The final P.E.I. driver in the event is Harrington resident Ken Murphy, who finished a solid third in the 2017 Summerside driving standings and just recently went over $1 million in career earnings in the race bike.
Other drivers in the event are John Gerard Kennedy, Redmond Doucet and Darren Crowe from Nova Scotia and Todd Trites representing New Brunswick.
The card will also feature a $2,500 Preferred Pace in Race 8, which will be headlined by top P.E.I. pacer Mr Irresistible, whom Hughes trains and drives for owner Danny Birt of Stratford.
(Red Shores)