Wild finishes pepper series’ history at legendary track
Three of the series’ four races at the 2.709-mile track situated on Île Notre-Dame have been decided on the final lap including last season’s rough-and-tumble battle between winner and hometown favorite Andrew Ranger and Jason Bowles.
On the white-flag lap, Ranger and Bowles were side-by-side heading into the hairpin Turn 10 where the two made contact forcing Ranger out of the racing groove. However, he was able to battle back by Turns 13 and 14. The two cars once again made contact causing Bowles to hit the inside retaining wall before Ranger went on to take the checkered flag.
“I don’t talk a lot about it,” said Bowles recently. “I know what he did. He knows what he did and things like that come back to you at some point.”Ranger, on the other hand, viewed it as last-lap racing.
“It was the last lap,” said Ranger. “We both wanted to win.”
The win was Ranger’s second at the track after winning the 2008 race by a tidy 2.846 seconds over Scott Steckly, but it wasn’t his only dramatic Montreal finish.
In the inaugural Montreal event in 2007, Ranger battled with Kerry Micks on the final lap. The two drag raced from Turn 10 to the finish line with Micks getting the edge by .103 of a second.
In 2009, the field was taking the green flag on a second attempt at a green-white-checkered finish when everyone stacked up in Turn 2 sending cars all over the place. The race was ended at that point. J.R. Fitzpatrick took the checkered flag under caution with Ranger trailing in second which foiled Ranger’s chance at winning all four road-course events en route to his second series championship.
I don’t know what it is,” said Fitzpatrick. “Everybody wants to win every race, but for some reason it gets pretty wild there.”