The Inside Line

By Greg MacPherson

THANK YOU, WALLY!

(Above) Retiring Inside Track Motorsport News Senior Contributor J. Wally Nesbitt at home with his ‘Walsport’ slot car track he built over the course of the pandemic. Photo by Greg MacPherson

On the Labour Day weekend of 1997, we launched Inside Track Motorsport News. Not long after, we received an envelope with a subscription form and a cheque inside. The name of our very first subscriber… John Wally Nesbitt. You may recognize the name.

Before getting too far into this, I want to let you know that Wally is retiring as our Senior Writer at the end of this year. There are some of his stories in this issue and the next one, but Wally is pretty adamant about that being it… for the most part.

In my case, I first came to know Wally as the writer who filed stories from the Mosport Speedway oval. And when I’d go to races there, he was the friendly guy with the Tilley hat, notebook and paper, and a stogie, when you walked through the gap in the grandstands, at the Start/Finish line.

But Wally came from a road racing background and long before he was filing stories from the oval, he loved what was happening a few hundred yards further east, on the legendary Mosport road course.

I can’t recall all the details, but it feels like it wasn’t long before our first subscriber started getting busy filing stories to us, beyond just the ones from the oval. His specialty was regional and professional road racing, but he also continued to help with stock car stories and content for projects like the NASCAR Pinty’s Series program.

In the more than 25 years we’ve been publishing Inside Track, there’s no doubt that Wally has written more stories and filled more pages than any of us.

His race reports are excellent, and his interviews are even better. We’d send him a name, a phone number and some background. And before you knew it, he’d file a great story. On the road racing side, he had his finger on the pulse and more often than not, he came to us with ideas for stories. Or he knew what we needed before we asked him for it, and he filed out of the blue, to stay ahead of things.

Wally has been an incredible contributor. He’s good, organized, efficient and he has a great attitude. Unless, of course, he’s talking about computers, in which case, he doesn’t even try to hide his hatred and disdain for the lousy machines. In this way, he has a bit of the legendary Chris Economaki in him, who also despised the things.

The fact that Wally had to spend so much time on computers, typing in stories and reports that he’d hand-written first, and then sending them to us via email, meant a lot to us. Then, we pushed our luck even further, asking him – and then teaching him – to post stories and press releases to our websites. And like a friendly trooper, he bit his lip and did that, too.

And if the computers didn’t drive him over the bend, there were all those freezing cold Thanksgiving weekends at Peterborough Speedway’s Autumn Colours Classic. Wally would be bundled up and sitting in a lawn chair down near Turn 4 until the final checkered flag flew, often well into the night, making sure every class and winner were included in his report.

Yet through it all, his love of racing and racers has never diminished. Wally would always smile and ask, ‘What’s next?’

In terms of his legacy in racing, Wally has produced hundreds and hundreds of amazing stories and reports about a lot of Canadian racing people who no one else would have ever written about. That’s our mandate and Wally has done an incredible service to our sport and community, and we all owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

And he’s been an absolute pleasure to deal with. Recently, on a tour of his home, it was very clear that he still loves racing as much as ever. I was very happy to see that all his efforts on our behalf haven’t burned him out on motorsports.

This was underscored when I saw his huge ‘Walsport’ slot car track, in one of his spare bedrooms. He credits all the time spent on the project for getting him through the pandemic with his sanity intact. Some people baked bread… Wally built a racetrack.

Wally, on behalf of all of us at Inside Track, thank you for efforts and friendship. Congratulations on your well-deserved retirement and we hope you’ll enjoy going back to being a fan. And we look forward to seeing you at the track. IT

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS...

Las Vegas will make its return to the Formula 1 calendar in 2023 for the first time since the 1982 Caesars Palace Grand Prix, and the Formula 1 circus was on hand on November 5, 2022 to preview the event, including demonstration runs on the street of ‘Sin City.’ Photo by Les Kalman