Three events into the Sports Car Club of America’s 2023 U.S. Majors Tour and Bill Okell is in a three-way tie for first place in the H Production national points standings.
The Saanich-based race driver, now 68, picked up 50 points after racing to two first-place finishes at the SCCA Hoosier Super Tour event, held Feb. 24 to 26 at Buttonwillow Raceway Park in Bakersfield, Calif.
Despite rain, snow, flooding and extreme conditions in southern California that had his many of his fellow competitors dropping like flies, Okell, the lone Canadian in the ranks, said he was all in and wasn’t going to be deterred by some bad weather.
“I paid several thousand dollars to get there. I’m gonna race in what I got, eh,” Okell told the Saanich News. “But the truth is, it was also a U.S. Majors Tour event and because I race up here, I race in that type of weather anyways. Once you go down to southern California, a lot of fair-weather racers don’t like to race in bad weather.”
At one point Okell even ran off the track and spun out, which he estimated added about 20 pounds of thick mud to the underside of his Huffaker Motorsports 1990 MG Midget. Somehow, he still managed to not only a make it onto the podium, but finish in first place.
“In what was probably only about a three-second slide, I slurped up 20 pounds of mud and caked it to the underside of the undercarriage. And when I had done that in the race all of the wheels became unbalanced, so there was this tremendous vibration when I was back on the track,” said Okell.
“You run off on a circuit like that and that’s the price you pay sometimes — you can really pay quite dearly. I piled on so much mud to the inside of the wheels that the whole car went out of balance. And if you’re going 100 miles per hour with each wheel coated in five pounds of mud, the whole thing is going to be out of balance. It’s risk versus reward and I was in it to finish.”
Okell is also coming off a win in last November’s SCCA 29th American Road Race of Champions at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta in Brazelton, Ga.
The opening race weekend of the West Coast swing has been popular for Okell as he won both races last year, which then set him up for a season-ending, sixth-place-overall finish among the 43 competing North American championship drivers in the national points standings - a personal best for the 68-year-old Saanich race driver.
READ MORE: Saanich driver wins gold south of the border at 29th American Road Race of Champions