How does the wife of a racing driver feel when her husband is spinning around a track at 145 miles an hour?
“Nervous,” says Ann McCaig, whose husband Roger McCaig took up the sport this year in a bid to win for Saskatchewan the Canadian Racing Trophy. Mrs. McCaig is the former Ann Schnell, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Lorne Schnell of Tisdale.
Mr. McCaig, president of a Regina concrete company, drives a Lotus 23-C, fastest car of its kind in Canada. This year he'll compete in 12 Canadian races.
“I fainted the first time I saw him spin out at Davidson,” said Mrs. McCaig, a former Miss Saskatchewan Roughrider. “The car was just coming out of a curve – not too far from where I was standing – and was passing another car going in the straightaway when the car began to spin.
“I thought he was in an accident and I fainted,” she said. “But I don't do that anymore. The wives of the other drivers came around me and said they all fainted the first time they saw their husbands spin out.”
The McCaigs live at 13 Turnbull Place, Regina, with their two children, Roxanne, 4, and John, 18 months. Mrs. McCaig says she was apprehensive about her husband taking up the sport.
She has ridden only once in the racing car. That was at MacDonald race track near Portage la Prairie, Man., in June when she triumphantly held the checkered flag when Roger won his first race.
“It was a terrifying experience," she recalls. “We drove around the track once. The car is so close to the ground and seems to go so fast. It's noisy, very windy and the curves come up very fast.”
After seeing her husband race several times, and win a couple of races, how does she feel about racing?
“If Roger wasn't in the sport I don't think I'd be interested. I still get a nervous stomach every time I see his car revving up at the starting line.”
While Mrs. McCaig feels a lot more comfortable about the sport now, she still prefers to be with him at the race track even though it means travelling across Canada.
“I like to be with him, to see how he's doing and see that everything is okay,” she says. “Being at the track is much better than waiting at home for a phone call to hear how Roger has made out. And, besides, it's really quite an exciting sport.”
Editor’s note: Roger McCaig became a full-time race car driver in 1969, the same year he was diagnosed with cancer. He would pass away in 1976. Ann McCaig, who earned a teaching degree from the University of Regina in 1961, would serve as the University of Calgary’s chancellor from 1994 to 1998, was inducted into the Alberta Order of Excellence in 2004, and was inducted on the Tisdale Middle & Secondary School’s Wall of Fall in 2010.
