When timing is everything

For Peter Cadiou, timing is everything.
In fact during Saturday night's blistering Sun Valley Speedway 300, Cadiou as CASCAR's director of scoring and timing, closely watched a number of laptop screens as D.J. Kennington blazed across the finish line, only a miniscule 0.371 seconds ahead of Brad Graham with pre-race favorite Don Thomson, Jr. third, some 3.191 seconds off Kennington's pace.
Within minutes after the race completion, a printout sheet was available in Cadiou's "tower," with the order of finish and assorted details for the 29 cars. It was handed to inquiring eyes by Cadiou's daughter, Robyn.
While Cadiou monitored the various readings from the tiny tracking devices inside each race car and from wires implanted in the track itself, his daughter did the race charting manually.
It's actually been a family affair for the Cadious.
"My wife, Rose, used to do this. She was my main lap charter from Day One. She just retired at the end of last year," said the calm, cool and collected Cadiou, adding, "She just got tired of traveling. The stuff that goes on. So now she stays home (in Cambridge, Ontario)."
Actually, for Cadiou, timing and scoring for the 12-race CASCAR season, is just a sideline from his main profession as a computer programmer for Hammond Manufacturing, located in Guelph, Ont.
"These are usually one or two day shows," he explained. "So I can work all week at my job, leave home on Friday night, be at the racetrack on Saturday and then be home on Sunday night. That's most of the time."
However, when the CASCAR Super Series decided to swing west for the MOPAR 300 in Calgary and the Sun Valley 300, his schedule changed.
"I've been here, since a week Thursday," he said early Saturday night."We flew out to Calgary last Thursday and we did the same layout Friday and Saturday. A lot of the CASCAR teams went back home (mainly to Ontario), but my daughter and myself stayed out here, so we got a bit of a holiday."
Cadiou continued by saying, "We came out here (to the Vernon area) on Wednesday and toured around, but then we go back (to Ontario) the first thing Sunday morning."
His daughter, Robyn, lives and works in Cambridge, Ontario, "so we book our holidays around the races," he said.
While sitting in the "tower," prior to the late afternoon start of the Sun Valley 300, Cadiou reminisced. "I come from the old manual days," he said, but he acknowledges that the high-tech approach certainly has changed racing throughout the world.
"It has eliminated an awful lot of disputes," he emphasized. "The big arguments are not so much with the scoring, but living with electronics, it sometimes misses to. The arguments come when someone is mad at someone ... like the race director might order a black flag to someone, who obviously didn't think they did wrong ... so that kind of dispute still happens. Unlike it used to be when we did it manually and the argument would become: 'Aw, you missed me, I was out there the whole time.'"
However, while Cadiou and Robyn charted the race with high-tech gadgets and also manually, the REAL boss was the race director, Don Radford, from Windsor, Ontario.
"If he sees something he doesn't like, he'll tell the flag man or one of the pit stewards and tell them 'to talk to that guy,'" said Cadiou. "Some of the things we do is stop and go, which in this case, he gets a black flag and that's in the form of a penalty, which is not really serious. Something a little bit more serious, they'll come in for a stop and talk and the steward will talk to you for a few minutes and, of course, you lose laps.
"And then the next thing is to bring you in and tell you to fix it right, and, maybe, you can go if we like what you've done. That's basically the three levels."
Besides having a computerized advantage of timing and scoring these "big time" races, Cadiou pointed out the racing teams are also connected to the high-tech with their own TVs or laptops. "So they can look and say, 'Oh, I'm chasing so and so or I'm on lap so and so.'"
As for his future, Cadiou smiled and said: "I was thinking about packing it in, in the last few years. But then I wondered what I was going to do and so I'll think I'll hang in for a bit longer."

PIT STOPS: For those who missed the results, here are the top four finishers, who actually completed the 300 laps:: 1. D.J. Kennington, Castrol Canada Dodge, St. Thomas, Ont. (2:07: 3.144; MPH average: 53.058); 2. Brad Graham, Challenger Motor Freight, Glencoe, Ont.; 3. Don Thomson, Jr., Home Hardware Chevrolet, Hamilton, Ont.; 4. Peter Gibbons, Canadian Tire/Monroe C, Stouffville, Ont. ... The lone female in 300 was rookie Tara MacLeod of Innisfil, Ont., who wound up 15th after completing 295 laps ... There were five race cautions for 53 laps ... Checking out the final results: Jason White of Sun Peaks, B.C., 16th (295 laps); Shane Charlton, Kelowna, 17th (295); James Ward, Kelowna, 18th (294); Randy Kozek, Kelowna, 20th (284); James White, Kamloops, 23rd (261); and Sean Maltman, Vernon, 27th (85) ... Sun Valley is the first and only B.C. location to host the National CASCAR Super Series ... Western Series champion Kevin Dowler gave his Eastern Canadian counterparts a "pep talk" about Sun Valley. He was quoted as saying, "it's fast and it's been good to us. There's no other track like it in Canada. There are two totally different turns at each end of the track. There's progressive banking in turns 3 and 4, and turn 1 is just about flat. And there's a kink in the middle of the front straight, It's almost like a small road course or maybe like Richmond International Raceway, with alternate ends." Dowler finished ninth on Saturday night.