By: Mike Sullivan/RaceCanada.ca 
June 4 2018 

2017 Was a tough year for us. As you know, for most of the last year, I've been mostly MIA. We've a had a few spurts here and there, but mostly not much.

My mom suffered some very serious health issues and has spent most of the last year in various hospitals or assisted living facilities throughout Scarborough and Pickering. Mom went in to the hospital on June 1 of last year a completely independent person, driving and living on her own, for what was supposed to be a few routine tests, and has never really left.

Unfortunately, too many of my hours and days over the last year, and more so in the last 6 months, have been filled fighting with the health care system, most notably with the CCAC (Community Care Access Centre or LHIN's as I think they are now called), trying to get my mom into the right facility to care for her. Unfortunately this has not gone well. I was never able to get the CCAC to agree to get mom into a facility that could properly care for her very difficult condition and now, with the end likely near, it's too late.

The levels of incompetence and complete lack of professionalism I have encountered in the last 6 months is staggering. If anybody tried to run a business the way the health ministry in general, and the CCAC/LHIN's specifically, is being run, they would have been sued out of business long ago. I'll likely be writing more about this in the future, right now I am too sad, too frustrated and too angry. When I'm ready, a lot of people will have a lot to answer for.

I was hoping to be at the regionals a few weeks ago, but unfortunately, we suffered a major setback and I wasn't able to make it. I was able to make it to Victoria Day, but things have really gone down hill since then, and as a result I'm still looking at an unfinished Victoria Day weekend race report. We did have someone at Detroit this past weekend who had a chance to sit down with Kyle Marcelli, so look for that interview to be posted tomorrow.

We do have some help coming, hopefully as soon as next weekend, so we are trying to get back as close to normal for the rest of the season as we can.

A big thanks to Chris through all of this, who kept our readers up to date on Facebook (www.FaceBook.com/RaceCanada.ca) all last season and continuing on this year,  he always does a great job.

Enough of looking back on the bad, time to look looking forward, and we're hoping 2018 is going to be a good, bounce-back year for us.

As noted, I'm hoping to bring in some extra help shortly for the day to day tasks, notably keeping the web site up to date everyday, stay tuned for details on that.

We'll also be opening our on-line store shortly. Look for a selection of memorabilia that will include die-cast models in NASCAR, sports cars and some F1, with a good selection of Gilles Villeneuve products already here and in stock, NASCAR t-shirts, hats, key chains and stickers, Scalextric slot cars and sets, and more. We're are always looking to add new suppliers and adding to current stock, so when the store opens, sign up for the newsletter and stay up to date on everything we're doing at RaceCanada.

As the store grows, we are hoping to add more products and more suppliers, if we can find good ones, so let us know what you would like to see us carry and we'll see what we can do!

We're also looking to launch RaceCanada.tv, a site dedicated to video, and increase our video offerings. (In all honesty, I suspect this won't happen until after the season at this point) Over the course of this past winter we have invested in new hardware and software that will make shooting & editing video at the track much quicker and easier. We are planning to test run a few video series concepts this year in the hope of them becoming a full-season series next year.

I'm also hoping to get back to more writing myself, ideally an every week or every other week opinion column looking all the different aspects of racing in Canada.

Lastly, and it's been on the radar for a few years now, we're hoping to finally launch a podcast. Much like the video series concepts, we may do a dozen or so podcasts through out the season, looking to up that to weekly next year as we still look to sort out some of our issues this year.

How much of this we can get done depends on how things go with all the hospitals right now, but we're going to aim high and hope for the best for the remainder of 2018.

A big thanks to everyone who has followed and read over the past year, and here's to a better 2018!