In four seasons, the Sports Car Championship Canada (SCCC) has had nine different drivers win championships across the three classes, intending to see the champions and top challengers developing their skills and progressing to bigger and better things.
Out of all the talent that has started to trickle into IMSA, SRO America, and other series, Zachary Vanier might be the best positioned for a long and fruitful career in the highest levels of sports car racing heading into 2025.
In fact, FEL Motorsports President Chris Bye, the founder of SCCC and its sister series Radical Cup Canada (RCC), admitted: “Zachary Vanier is exactly the reason we started both racing series.”
Bye has a particular fondness for the talent of the Sudbury, Ontario native, who became SCCC’s second GT4 class Champion back in 2022. But before then – and just before the formation of the series – Bye gave Vanier his first experience in multi-class sports car racing.
Vanier had been quickly proving himself as one of the outstanding young talents in the Canadian karting and junior formula circuits. Like his father Greg, Vanier began racing in snowcross as a child, but when he was nine years old, he made the switch to go-karts. He dominated his local circuit, Sudbury Kartways, as a child – winning three consecutive track championships.
But his karting career culminated with a Canadian National Karting Championship title in 2016, at age 13 he was the nation’s leading driver in the tough Briggs & Stratton Junior class and he did it with a come-from-behind win in the grand final.
At 15, he made the step up to the Canadian F1600 Championship. Vanier’s first season, in 2018, saw him make significant improvements from the start of the season to the end – culminating in his first win at Circuit Mont-Tremblant.
It was the catalyst for an outstanding second season, where Vanier collected 17 podiums in 18 races – 6 of them wins – and was second in the F1600 Class A standings behind only the older and more experienced Olivier Bedard, earning Vanier a spot on Team Canada’s entry to the BRSCC Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch.
FEL was one of F1600’s major partners by this time, and Bye had recently purchased an Audi RS 3 TCR touring car for driver training events. A fateful 2020 season followed: The COVID-19 pandemic left Canadian teams like Pfaff Motorsport unable to travel into and out of the US, and it also forced the Canadian Touring Car Championship (CTCC) to scale back to a condensed season.
So Pfaff and FEL worked together, entering the #9 Audi TCR for Vanier in the CTCC – carrying the signature red and black plaid with silver livery that the IMSA team was making famous in a hurry. With five wins in six races, Vanier proved to be a sensation as he won the 2020 TCR class Championship – and while he wouldn’t have known it at the time, the eventual folding of the CTCC after the season meant that Vanier would be one of the series’ last champions.
During the SCCC’s first season and with Vanier having stood on the sidelines for most of 2021, Multimatic Motorsports put him in a second Ford Mustang GT4 to team up with Marco Signoretti. Signoretti won both duels, but Vanier ran him close, impressing the eventual 2021 GT4 Champion.
Vanier didn’t lose touch with the Pfaff family though. In 2022, Steve Bortolotti’s team put together a new SCCC programme built around Vanier, putting him in the #9 McLaren 570S GT4. A sweep of the opening double-header in Calabogie got his season started on the right track, and another sweep of the Ontario Circuit helped bolster his title challenge – though he wasn’t perfect, as the likes of Gavin Sanders and Jack Polito proved to be tough challengers.
But in the end, Vanier held on to win the GT4 Championship in a close fight over young Quebecois newcomer Charles Robin, with 429 points to 405 for Robin.
When the season wrapped up, Vanier got a call from Mark Kvamme of MDK Motorsports, asking him to run the Porsche Sprint Challenge North America finale at Circuit of the Americas. Vanier picked up quickly with podiums in both races.
That one-shot opportunity yielded a full-season ride with MDK in the 2023 season, as a member of the coveted Porsche Motorsport North America (PMNA) Junior Development Programme.
Vanier didn’t let the opportunity go to waste – he dominated the 992 Pro-Am category, taking a staggering 12 wins in 14 races to clinch the championship in his first full season of racing Porsche one-makes. Porsche Motorsport North America also rewarded Vanier with the Junior Championship and promotion to Porsche Carrera Cup North America, the region’s top category and a support series to the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
The lanky Dutchman Loek Hartog dominated most of 2024 as he came over from the German Carrera Cup series, but Vanier took the spotlight for himself on multiple occasions in PCCNA. His first win came during the Formula One Miami Grand Prix weekend, as he became the first Sprint Challenge driver to win in the ultra-competitive Carrera Cup.
He closed out the year with a wire-to-wire win during Petit Le Mans weekend at Road Atlanta, and another F1 support race victory at COTA. That was enough for Vanier to finish third in the 2024 Pro standings behind Hartog and Ryan Yardley.
While 2025 plans have yet to be determined, Vanier has many options in front of him – he could make another run at the Carrera Cup North America title, he could make the leap to the Michelin Pilot Challenge, and who’s to say that a run in the big IMSA series couldn’t happen sooner rather than later?
He’s certainly cut from the same cloth as his accomplished countrymen, Zacharie Robichon and Roman de Angelis, who both took similar paths through Canada’s national circuit, then stepped up to Porsche Carrera Cup racing, before both drivers reached sports car racing stardom and became IMSA GTD Champions (Robichon in 2021, de Angelis in 2022).
So long as Vanier stays along this upward path, he’ll almost certainly follow Robichon and de Angelis into the major circuits of sports car racing, and become the shining example of what FEL Motorsports sought to accomplish when establishing SCCC four years ago.
Images © Porsche, Jordan Lenssen / Audi, FEL Motorsports
Luz Howe
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