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Feschuk: Young Canadian racer no stranger to facing challenges - thestar.com
The cruel kids, when they saw J.R. Fitzpatrick walking the school halls wearing that hard-to-miss pair of over-the-ear hearing aids, would call him Deaf Boy.
Perhaps they didn’t understand that John Ryan Fitzpatrick, though he was born with inferior hearing, could usually make out every insult, and that for nearly every cheap shot, he was more than happy to dish out recompense. What they didn’t understand was that they were probably in for a shoving match, and possibly an all-out fist fight.
And maybe the cruel kids would have never chosen their words so carelessly if they’d known that Fitzpatrick — en route to becoming, at age 22, one of Canada’s most promising race-car drivers — has long been a passionate kick-boxer.
That Fitzpatrick has never been afraid to exact quick revenge might explain why he has appeared so comfortable this week among the professional paint traders in the lead-up to NASCAR’s season-opening weekend at famed Daytona Speedway. If all goes well, the rookie from Cambridge, Ont., will be in the No. 27 Baker Curb Racing Ford Mustang during Saturday’s Nationwide series DRIVE4COPD 300.
An undercard event for Sunday’s Daytona 500, it’s a race that is expected to feature the likes of Kyle Busch, Tony Stewart and Danica Patrick.
While competing nose-to-tail at speeds of more than 300 km/h has always been Fitzpatrick’s goal — and competing in the top-tier Sprint Cup series is his dream destination — for every bumper he rubs, there’s a part of him that’s still giving it back to the schoolyard bullies.
“Those feelings or emotions or whatever you want to call them probably still are the reason why I’m heading to where I want to be,” Fitzpatrick was saying this week, over the phone from Daytona.
“The fact that people thought that because I was hearing impaired I was never going to be a race-car driver. . . . It’s like the movies, when somebody gets picked on so much, and they grow up being a very angry person — I took my anger and I turned it into drive, stubbornness and aiming toward being a great race-car driver.”
If he ever gets to “great”, it’ll be a rare feat. The only Canadian to win a race in NASCAR’s top series, Earl Ross, did so in 1974. And while Canadians have seen some success in NASCAR’s second- and third-tier series, much of that noise has been made by Ron Fellows, who won exclusively as a road-racing specialist.
Since the vast majority of NASCAR races are held on ovals, the trick for Fitzpatrick, or any young Canadian hoping to make it big, will be to become an expert at the perpetual left turn. And considering this side of the border doesn’t offer much in the way of training grounds — Fitzpatrick grew up racing on a half-mile oval; Daytona, at 2.5 miles, is a different kind of beast — the task requires some quick study.
“You only get one or two chances to stub your toe before you’re cast aside down here,” said Jason Sharpe, Fitzpatrick’s manager. “You have very little time to prove you can do this, you can do it well, and you can attract cash (from sponsors).”
You can’t make much headway in racing, of course, without some house money. J.R. said his father, John, is a successful businessman who owns a heavy-machinery moving company, among other interests. The youngest of five children — his older siblings are all sisters, none of whom race — J.R. has been testing the limits of various forms of transportation since he was a toddler. He claims to have video of himself as a two-year-old in a snowmobile race. He was racing motorbikes by age four, and small race cars by age six.
By 18, he was the youngest driver to win the points championship in what is now NASCAR’s northerly arm, the Canadian Tire Series.
His limited hearing, he said, has occasionally held him back. Racing on ovals, after all, relies heavily on the radio communication between a driver and his spotter — a team member sitting high above the track who can instruct the driver on his position in relation to his competitors. When Fitzpatrick’s in-car radio malfunctioned in Nashville a couple of years ago, in a Camping World truck race, it led to a wreck.
But Fitzpatrick, who wears a hearing aid in each ear — both of which are far smaller than the clunky units that brought him scorn as a child — said he feels his other senses are sharper as a result of his disability.
“It sounds silly, but you can feel the difference in the wind, in the side of the car, the vibrations, things like that,” Fitzpatrick said. “I rely more on stuff like that than the noise of a vehicle coming up around me. . . . But it would be nice to hear more.”
Hearing damage, of course, has long been a hazard of a life spent at the track. Fellows, 51, said he suffers from a permanent ringing in his ears, damage he attributes to lapping in what amounted to inadequate foam ear plugs that had the habit of occasionally falling out during races. And while Mario Andretti, 70, escaped a legendary career with his hearing intact, he said that many of his contemporaries “can’t hear a thing.” Either way, Andretti said he figures crystalline hearing “is not essential” to being a top driver.
“If (Fitzpatrick) can hear his spotter, he’s good,” Andretti said.
Matt Crews, the president of Baker Curb Racing, said he has been impressed with what he’s seen from Fitzpatrick this week.
“He went out and practised nose-to-tail with Kyle Busch, the top driver in our sport right now, and J.R. wasn’t intimidated by that at all,” said Crews. “He feels like he has a lot to prove.”
NASCAR’s proving ground, of course, sometimes extends beyond the race track; the sport is famous for pit-lane donnybrooks, and Fitzpatrick is game. Last fall, in the final lap of the final race of the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series season, Fitzpatrick was running second when a rival named Kerry Micks bumped him into the wall. Springing from his car in the race’s wake, Fitzpatrick made a beeline for Micks; if not for the intervention of officials, fists might have flown.
That Fitzpatrick has vowed to reply — “If I come back next year, it’ll be to make sure (Meeks’s) car’s 20 feet in the grandstands,” he told the Star’s Norris McDonald in September — came as no surprise to anyone who knows him.
“He’s a feisty guy. He’s a fair racer, but if guys push him around on the race track, he’s not going to stand for that,” Sharpe said. “Every time he gets an opportunity in a car, he leaves everything out there. . . . He’s a street fighter.”
When Fitzpatrick hits the throttle on Saturday, he’ll be a long way from the school hallways where he absorbed so many barbs as a child. But maybe, in some ways, he’ll feel like he’s back there. It won’t be clunky hearing aids that make him a target this weekend; it’ll be a yellow stripe on his bumper that denotes he’s a rookie.
But NASCAR’s bullies should beware: Fitzpatrick, who says he has never picked a fight in his life, is wholly against running from them.
“(Growing up) was a tough battle. You get picked on every day over the same thing you have no control over, it gets sickening after a while,” Fitzpatrick said.
“Sometimes I wish I’d done the proper thing, ‘Go tell the teacher and the teacher will look after it.’ But I was always the type who stood up for myself, and I tried to look after everything by myself. I’m a stubborn person like that.
“I’m hoping in the future to start a foundation of some sort to help young people who are growing up with a hearing impairment. I’m trying my best to tell my story in a way I could help other people.”
The cruel kids, when they saw J.R. Fitzpatrick walking the school halls wearing that hard-to-miss pair of over-the-ear hearing aids, would call him Deaf Boy.
Perhaps they didn’t understand that John Ryan Fitzpatrick, though he was born with inferior hearing, could usually make out every insult, and that for nearly every cheap shot, he was more than happy to dish out recompense. What they didn’t understand was that they were probably in for a shoving match, and possibly an all-out fist fight.
And maybe the cruel kids would have never chosen their words so carelessly if they’d known that Fitzpatrick — en route to becoming, at age 22, one of Canada’s most promising race-car drivers — has long been a passionate kick-boxer.
That Fitzpatrick has never been afraid to exact quick revenge might explain why he has appeared so comfortable this week among the professional paint traders in the lead-up to NASCAR’s season-opening weekend at famed Daytona Speedway. If all goes well, the rookie from Cambridge, Ont., will be in the No. 27 Baker Curb Racing Ford Mustang during Saturday’s Nationwide series DRIVE4COPD 300.
An undercard event for Sunday’s Daytona 500, it’s a race that is expected to feature the likes of Kyle Busch, Tony Stewart and Danica Patrick.
While competing nose-to-tail at speeds of more than 300 km/h has always been Fitzpatrick’s goal — and competing in the top-tier Sprint Cup series is his dream destination — for every bumper he rubs, there’s a part of him that’s still giving it back to the schoolyard bullies.
“Those feelings or emotions or whatever you want to call them probably still are the reason why I’m heading to where I want to be,” Fitzpatrick was saying this week, over the phone from Daytona.
“The fact that people thought that because I was hearing impaired I was never going to be a race-car driver. . . . It’s like the movies, when somebody gets picked on so much, and they grow up being a very angry person — I took my anger and I turned it into drive, stubbornness and aiming toward being a great race-car driver.”
If he ever gets to “great”, it’ll be a rare feat. The only Canadian to win a race in NASCAR’s top series, Earl Ross, did so in 1974. And while Canadians have seen some success in NASCAR’s second- and third-tier series, much of that noise has been made by Ron Fellows, who won exclusively as a road-racing specialist.
Since the vast majority of NASCAR races are held on ovals, the trick for Fitzpatrick, or any young Canadian hoping to make it big, will be to become an expert at the perpetual left turn. And considering this side of the border doesn’t offer much in the way of training grounds — Fitzpatrick grew up racing on a half-mile oval; Daytona, at 2.5 miles, is a different kind of beast — the task requires some quick study.
“You only get one or two chances to stub your toe before you’re cast aside down here,” said Jason Sharpe, Fitzpatrick’s manager. “You have very little time to prove you can do this, you can do it well, and you can attract cash (from sponsors).”
You can’t make much headway in racing, of course, without some house money. J.R. said his father, John, is a successful businessman who owns a heavy-machinery moving company, among other interests. The youngest of five children — his older siblings are all sisters, none of whom race — J.R. has been testing the limits of various forms of transportation since he was a toddler. He claims to have video of himself as a two-year-old in a snowmobile race. He was racing motorbikes by age four, and small race cars by age six.
By 18, he was the youngest driver to win the points championship in what is now NASCAR’s northerly arm, the Canadian Tire Series.
His limited hearing, he said, has occasionally held him back. Racing on ovals, after all, relies heavily on the radio communication between a driver and his spotter — a team member sitting high above the track who can instruct the driver on his position in relation to his competitors. When Fitzpatrick’s in-car radio malfunctioned in Nashville a couple of years ago, in a Camping World truck race, it led to a wreck.
But Fitzpatrick, who wears a hearing aid in each ear — both of which are far smaller than the clunky units that brought him scorn as a child — said he feels his other senses are sharper as a result of his disability.
“It sounds silly, but you can feel the difference in the wind, in the side of the car, the vibrations, things like that,” Fitzpatrick said. “I rely more on stuff like that than the noise of a vehicle coming up around me. . . . But it would be nice to hear more.”
Hearing damage, of course, has long been a hazard of a life spent at the track. Fellows, 51, said he suffers from a permanent ringing in his ears, damage he attributes to lapping in what amounted to inadequate foam ear plugs that had the habit of occasionally falling out during races. And while Mario Andretti, 70, escaped a legendary career with his hearing intact, he said that many of his contemporaries “can’t hear a thing.” Either way, Andretti said he figures crystalline hearing “is not essential” to being a top driver.
“If (Fitzpatrick) can hear his spotter, he’s good,” Andretti said.
Matt Crews, the president of Baker Curb Racing, said he has been impressed with what he’s seen from Fitzpatrick this week.
“He went out and practised nose-to-tail with Kyle Busch, the top driver in our sport right now, and J.R. wasn’t intimidated by that at all,” said Crews. “He feels like he has a lot to prove.”
NASCAR’s proving ground, of course, sometimes extends beyond the race track; the sport is famous for pit-lane donnybrooks, and Fitzpatrick is game. Last fall, in the final lap of the final race of the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series season, Fitzpatrick was running second when a rival named Kerry Micks bumped him into the wall. Springing from his car in the race’s wake, Fitzpatrick made a beeline for Micks; if not for the intervention of officials, fists might have flown.
That Fitzpatrick has vowed to reply — “If I come back next year, it’ll be to make sure (Meeks’s) car’s 20 feet in the grandstands,” he told the Star’s Norris McDonald in September — came as no surprise to anyone who knows him.
“He’s a feisty guy. He’s a fair racer, but if guys push him around on the race track, he’s not going to stand for that,” Sharpe said. “Every time he gets an opportunity in a car, he leaves everything out there. . . . He’s a street fighter.”
When Fitzpatrick hits the throttle on Saturday, he’ll be a long way from the school hallways where he absorbed so many barbs as a child. But maybe, in some ways, he’ll feel like he’s back there. It won’t be clunky hearing aids that make him a target this weekend; it’ll be a yellow stripe on his bumper that denotes he’s a rookie.
But NASCAR’s bullies should beware: Fitzpatrick, who says he has never picked a fight in his life, is wholly against running from them.
“(Growing up) was a tough battle. You get picked on every day over the same thing you have no control over, it gets sickening after a while,” Fitzpatrick said.
“Sometimes I wish I’d done the proper thing, ‘Go tell the teacher and the teacher will look after it.’ But I was always the type who stood up for myself, and I tried to look after everything by myself. I’m a stubborn person like that.
“I’m hoping in the future to start a foundation of some sort to help young people who are growing up with a hearing impairment. I’m trying my best to tell my story in a way I could help other people.”