So this Polish guy and an Irishman climb into a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia and ... well, the result was no joke, as the pair won the first Canadian Rally Championship in 1957, a feat being celebrated at a banquet in Toronto this Saturday night that will also see the 50th champions presented with their trophies.
By the time the national championship was created in 1957, driver Leslie Chelminski, now 92, and navigator Les Stanley, 84, had been a successful team for some time, with a number of Quebec rally championships to their credit. They went on to win the national championship again in 1958.
For the 50th season of the Canadian Rally Championship, Antoine L'Estage becomes the new reigning champion with 106 points, ahead of Matthew Iorio, 63 points; Norm LeBlanc, 48; Sylvain Erickson, 45; Frank Sprongl, 42 and Mathieu L'Estage, 31. Ole Holter, Matthew Iorio's co-driver, wins the co-drivers' championship, leading Nathalie Richard, Chloé Erickson and Keith Morison.
Those first Canadian rally champions were, and still are, an interesting pair.
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Les Stanley (left) and Leslie Chelminski (right) prepare for a rally event in 1957. They put their Volkswagen Karmann Ghia through its paces at over 30 events to win the championship.
Chelminski remembers their 1957 Karmann Ghia as being well-prepared by VW Canada and says he and Stanley likely did more than 30 events to win the championship. Most were in Quebec and Ontario and some were a gruelling three days long. The endurance factor was compounded by the ice and snow conditions of winter rallies and he says average speeds were high. “You had to maintain your speed right through the rally. Once you lost time, you could not make it up.”
When the pair got together in the mid-1950s, Stanley had been navigating for another well-known Quebec rally driver of the time, Graham Locke, but the team of Chelminski and Stanley was soon working very well together.
“He was very quiet and never worried about bad driving and accidents and things like that,” Chelminski says of Stanley. “We were the best team for many years, Les and myself.”
Stanley shared driving chores in the early days but soon concentrated on navigation. “With me navigating and Chelminski driving we won a lot of events,” he says. And driving with Chelminski was always an experience.
Stanley remembers one event when the generator failed on their Porsche. “We were just running on the battery and to save it the lights went out and the wipers were no longer used,” he says, his Irish lilt and sense of fun still obviously intact. “We were driving at night hanging out the door with a flashlight to see where the heck we were going.”
At the midnight rest stop Stanley told Chelminski to keep the clerk of the course, Peter Bone (of Mississauga) busy and, while he did so, “borrowed” the fully-charged battery out of the Volkswagen he was using as a course-opening car.
“When he came out it wouldn't start but we gave him a push and off he went,” laughs Stanley. And with the fresh battery aboard the pair made it through the night and went on to win the event.
On another occasion, Chelminski fell asleep at about five o'clock one morning and their Volkswagen ended up in a field, upside down. “We were off in the wilds, but a hydro crew came along. And I swear they were all wearing red-checked shirts and singing Allouette. About a dozen of them physically picked the car up and put it back on the road.”
One night they were left to their own resources. “We were coming into a checkpoint and got caught in an icy rut and, whoops, over we went. We ended up pushing the car on its roof. It tobogganed along quite nicely to the entrance to the field and we tipped it back on its wheels and drove on into the checkpoint.”
Chelminski was also a determined sort. On one uphill stage, one of his best friends, Andy Czerwinski, was stuck on the narrow snow-filled road with his driver's door open. “Close your door, I'm coming through. If it's not closed, I'll take it with me,” Stanley recalls Chelminski yelling. “He went straight on up the hill and took the door out completely. And spent the next two weeks helping Andy repair it.”
Chelminski was born in Poland in 1915 and during the Second World War joined the Royal Air Force in Britain, flying Wellington bombers, and then serving as an engineering officer in Italy. He came to Canada in 1948 and went to work as an engineer with Canadair in Montreal, working on CF-86 Sabre fighters.
He became involved in car rallying in the early 1950s driving a Hillman and by 1956 he and Stanley had won their first Quebec Championship in a Renault. They also won it in 1957 and 1958. He competed in the Shell 4000 rally in 1961, 1962 and 1963, driving one of three factory-prepared Mercedes-Benz entries and then Chevrolet's Chevy II.
One of Chelminski's last long-distance runs was a publicity drive for Citroën that involved driving from Halifax to Vancouver in five days, not an easy feat in those days. Stanley had plotted the route but didn't make the drive due to an injury.
Chelminski was also involved in racing, competing at the St. Eugčne, Que., airport circuit and in hill climbs at Mont Gabriel. He went on to build a racing car of his own based on Triumph components but sporting what he says was the first fibreglass body built in Canada. Appropriately named the Chelminski Special, it was later sold to an American who wrote it off.
Chelminski's career as a serious rally driver was winding down by the mid-1960s and he drove his last events in the early 1970s.
He left Canadair in 1975 and the following year became Director of Sports for the 1976 Olympics, and was then involved the Canadian Executive Service Organization for the next 25 years, offering engineering consulting services around the world. He took up windsurfing in his 60s and still drives to his cottage in Vermont.
Stanley was born in Northern Ireland in 1922, became an instrument maker and worked for the Short Brothers aircraft company in Belfast after the war. He and his wife were keen glider enthusiasts and moved to Canada in 1954 in part because they felt it offered more scope for that sport. “But I've never put a foot in a glider since we came,” he laughs.
That's because he, too, went to work for Canadair, where a lot of the engineers were Brits and keen on rallying. “I was going to buy my first car, a big Buick, and one of the other engineers talked myself and Graham Locke into buying a VW so we could go on the winter rally (they won). And from that time on, I just got stuck with small cars and rallies.”
Canadair had an active car club at the time that put on a number of events and Stanley was mainly partnered with Locke initially and on occasion with his wife Margaret before linking up with Chelminski. “When I was driving with Chelminski, Locke was always our toughest competition,” he says.
Stanley swapped rallying for competitive sailing in the 1960s. He worked for Canadair for many years and did a stint with Boeing in Seattle before returned to Canada to work for Pratt & Whitney. Retired for 10 years, he lives in Longueuil, Que.
Stories like Stanley's and Chelminski's, and much of the more formal history of rallying in Canada, remain undocumented and that's something Terry Epp, president of the Canadian Association of Rallysport (CARS), is hoping to rectify.
A call has gone out to anybody involved in the sport's early years to provide information. CARS can be reached by phone/fax at 905-640-6444 or by e-mail at office@carsrally.ca. The CARS website is www.carsrally.ca.