When he’s not farming 500 acres of organic grain or playing drums in a band, 61-year-old Norm Chura races snowmobiles.
Snowmobile racing has been a serious passion of Chura’s since 1978, and he’s got a houseful of trophies to prove it. Over the years, he has raced in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and the northern U.S. He even made it to the 1999 World Championship Snowmobile Derby in Eagle River, Wisconsin. Yamaha Canada sponsored him at the time and Chura said he would have come in third place were it not for a crash that ended the day—Chura walked away from the wreckage with a sore knee.
Bitten by the snowmobile bug
Chura has been enamoured of snowmobiles since childhood. He remembers when they first came out.
“I saw tracks going by the farmyard and I used to walk them for a mile just to walk on top of the tracks and experience that new thing that came out in this world,” he said.
As a kid growing up in Beausejour, Manitoba, Chura knew what snowmobile racing was all about. He went to many races at the town’s historic ice oval track long before he had his own racing sled.
In the 1960s, Polaris Industries opened a plant in Beausejour, and Chura’s first job out of high school was assembling snowmobiles at the plant. That was when his interest in engine performance started to grow.
When he was 16 years old, Chura was asked by a Rupp snowmobile dealer in Beausejour to start racing Rupps under a sponsorship but his parents weren’t keen on the idea. Ten years later, though, Chura was racing snowmobiles on the drag strip and then he made the switch to oval racing.
Sharing the enthusiasm
When he started to gain recognition as a professional ice oval racer, Chura formed his own racing team, Norm Chura Racing. Along with a pit crew, Chura often has a young driver on the team.
“It is like a training program,” he said. “Kids come to me when they are 16 or 17 and ask if they can work with me and race my sleds . . . I teach them what I know about motors. I try to keep some of the secrets behind.”
Chura said racers will develop good driving skills only after they’ve mastered the art of mechanics.
“On the oval track, man and sled have to work together,” he said.
In the early days of his career when there were no fancy gauges for monitoring engine performance, Chura and racers like him learned how to tune their sleds by ear and feel. Chura said some of his knowledge of sled motors also came from working on the machines he grew up on.
“(I remember) tearing them apart outside in the bitter cold in minus 30 temperatures because they were always breaking down,” he said.
These days, Chura does all his wrenching in a warm shop near his home in Anola, Manitoba, which is south of Beausejour. He owns about 30 snowmobiles and races six of them. When asked if he had any favourites, Chura named three of his vintage racers: a 1970 Arctic Cat Puma and two 1973 Polaris Starfires.
“They’ve done me well,” he said. “I have other sleds for the newer classes that are faster, but that’s not my passion—it’s these vintage ones I enjoy.”
Long live vintage
Ten years ago, Chura was concerned that vintage snowmobile racing was dying out in Canada and the U.S., but he’s pleased to see the sport has come back and that it is gaining popularity again.
“There’s a lot of people who are about 10 years younger than me that are getting into it now,” said Chura.
He likes to encourage younger generations to embrace the sport as well.
After 35 years of racing, Chura admits that it is time for him to scale down for 2013 and consider racing two sleds instead of all six. That being said, racing fans can see his name signed up for all classes at the 51st annual Canadian Power Toboggan Championships in Beausejour, which take place March 2 and 3, 2013.
