Gaunt: "looking forward to seeing a lot of cars out there"

The Fyre Place & Patio Shop OSCAAR Hot Rods presented by Bromley Automotive continue to grow with veteran racer John Gaunt ready to join the fold in 2026.

“I’m very excited,” Gaunt said. “I see there's a lot of new blood - like I see Lane Zardo's got a car, so I'm pretty excited about that. There's a lot of good guys, I think in the series, and I think it'll be tough sledding, and I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of cars out there; that's what I'm hoping and I think we're going to see that. There are a lot of different drivers and so you're not always racing the same cars every weekend, so I find that refreshing again.”

The decision to get involved with the Hot Rods was simple for John Gaunt, after taking a 10 year hiatus from the sport to have a daughter, and open up his shop. A visit with his brother Marty Gaunt and conversations while watching a Hot Rod race on TV kicked off the conversation of building one of their own.

“He said when you get home, start scouting what the other guys are doing because I hadn’t been to a race track in 10 years,” Gaunt recalled. “I stayed away because it's an addiction. So then I went to the Jukasa race and I watched them and Shawn Murray was with me and he said, ‘what are you doing?’ I said, ‘ I want to check these cars out’ and he says we should get one. I said, ‘Well, my brother and I are thinking of one’ so Shawn helped me get a car.”

They bought a car from Tyler Liscum and began trying to get a body for it, when his brother stepped in with the thought of bringing the car down to the United States to do the body “dirt, sheep cheap.” They took the car down originally in 2019, with it unfortunately being there longer than expected as a result of COVID. 

“There's a guy that worked for him that didn't have any kids and was bored,” Gaunt recalled. “He went in to work every day and picked away on it, and he basically overhauled the whole car. He stripped it down, he painted it and put it, put a body on it, they did everything. It was refurbished from front to the back, so then I finally got it up here in 2022, and ran the three Hot Rods races at Sunset and really enjoyed it.

“I always like the steel body cars, have always liked them and then you get a good chassis like an old sportsman car and you can pick them up cheap. Like I paid $3750 for the chassis, and then it starts from there. That was the cheapest part and then you know - look at Tom Walters. He scouts the cars, flips them over; so does Rob Bromley. I think he's got three of them and he found another which he’s turning into a road racing car. So there's a lot of good guys in it.

“It's starting to get real racing now. Some people get emotional in the pits after the night’s races but it's all good, they race hard. You got to work on your car to be competitive, so I think it's a good series.I think that the series is getting a lot of respect with the guys that are in it and like I said, there's probably at least 15 plus real good guys in that class. So I can always see multiple winners or guys that run up front and most of the guys are pretty decent to race on and off the racetrack.”

Looking ahead at the schedule, Gaunt admittedly is excited to get to Peterborough Speedway.

“I’ve always liked Peterborough,” he admitted. “Flamboro, I've raced there a little bit like early 1980s quite a bit; I'm looking forward to going there.”

For Gaunt, he has always had a love of stock cars from a young age, but his parents would not let him go to the race track. He would end up going to the track for the first time once he turned 17. 

“We go to the racetrack, and you're hearing the engines just suck in the sky and blow out the exhaust pipe,” he recalled. “I get the shivers; I gotta get one of these, right? So then it starts from there and then I remember going to Sunset Speedway by myself with a couple of buddies after that. I remember going up to the front gate, and there was a caution right as we got there late, and there was a No. 47 car on the racetrack. It’s Tommy Walters, no door, no Fender, no hood. He's had a rough night, but he's racing. So there's him and Milligan. I would go whenever I could go to a race.”

The rest is history as they say from there, as Gaunt would write his own history books once he was able to get behind the wheel with multiple victories across the board in different divisions.

Continuing to have success and be involved in the sport is great to see for fans of the Gaunt family, especially in knowing Marty was inducted into the Canadian Motorsports Hall of Fame this year. Seeing the ceremony in February was “mind-blowing” for John.

“He was 11 - I was 19 years old when I first went to the racetrack,” Gaunt recalled. “So I'm not saying I taught everything he knows, but until he was about 18 or 19. He went on his own, and so I thought it was mind-boggling when you sit back and think, we were just guys going to the racetrack, like people go every week. We went into Sunset, where the first place I raced in 1978, and he was just a little guy that just had to come. I'm not sure how he paid his way in or how he got in, but we just brought to the races. 

“He was like a fixture, because he was my little brother and then he started learning more and more all the time. Then as time goes on, he worked for Peter Gibbons up here. I kind of ran out of money, so then he kind of left racing with me and went on with Peter Gibbons, and it took off. From there, he went down south, met a guy, met a guy, and then meets Roger Penske and works for him.  So he just goes from pillar to post, and so he got educated all hands-on and putting a lot of effort in, and you look back like, how did you get here? 

“It's amazing, and it's all out of effort and determination. So yes, I was extremely proud of him. Plus, he's a good brother; me and him always have been tight; like I said, I'd bring to the race track and he would come to the race shop with me and he would do whatever I wanted him to do, like clean and grind bolts. He never got to really do a lot of stuff when he was 12 or 13. Then he starts doing stuff and then he became the crew chief when he's like 19. He’s running the show because he knows he's starting to learn his own things.”