TORONTO – As the city prepares for the 2024 edition of the Honda Indy, organisers have announced a new hazard for the elite open-wheel event. Racers will now have to wind their way around elderly Punjabi men who casually wander across the track.
“Every Indy event wants to make their mark with a unique, location-based experience” explained track manager Baldev Sandhu. “In this case, we wanted our racers to get a sense of what it feels like to be a resident of The Big Smoke, and we thought, ‘What better way to capture the experience of driving in the GTA, than to force competitors to dodge a pack of old fogeys who stroll past vehicles careening at 300 km/h with the fearlessness of someone who’s spent his entire life navigating the streets of Jalandhar?'”.
Sandhu elaborated “Toronto has a huge Punjabi community and, while those elderly folks who are born in Canada are content to join groups of mall-walkers, or just stick to the sidewalk, those who spent their formative years abroad simply aren’t accustomed to the idea of personal safety”. He continued “For them, the notion of sharing a road with a stoned, millionaire, teenager doing doughnuts in his Maserati isn’t any different than visiting your grand kids by sauntering across a stretch of highway filled with scooters carrying ten people, a three-wheel cab taking a turn on one tire, and literally every form of livestock you can possibly imagine”.
“We’re even trying to recruit the grandparents of the drivers, themselves, so they too can experience the horrifying realisation that the crazy old bapu pushing his walker down the 401 is actually your Nana”
Other Toronto-themed challenges for drivers will include pushing through flooded sections of the track, taking turns past crumbling walls that could collapse onto the road at any moment, and trying not to collide with police cruisers flying down the route in the wrong direction, without a single thought for public safety.
