For most people involved in the motorcycle racing business, the winter months are an off-season; catching up at the shop or office before the next race season kicks off in the winter-delayed spring. There are sponsors to service or find, bikes to build (if you are lucky to have that level of support) and racers to support.
For top tuner Willie Vass of Alberta, the off-season is catch up time. During the prime riding months of the spring and summer, he is busy travelling with Ben Young, who is based in Collingwood, Ontario – not a short trip from the Vass shop in Didsbury, north of Calgary in oil country.
This means Willie is seldom in his shop during riding season, and when he returns home, he must catch up with existing customers as well as family, be they street bike riders, or a wide range of competitors on everything from minibikes to Pro Superbikes.
Last year was another good one for Vass Performance. Since 2016, Vass and Ontario-based former Hindle-builder Scott Cartier have looked after the factory-supported BMWs of Ben Young, winning the Bridgestone CSBK overall title four times (with three Constructors titles), including a missed season in 2020 due to the pandemic.
As well, both Cartier and Vass help a selection of other competitors. This includes recently injured Young-buddy Brad Macrae and rising western hero John Laing. Vass supported the impressive shoe-string program of Phillip DeGamma-Blanchet in 2024 and travelled to Japan to work for Young in his World Endurance effort with BMW Motorrad.
“I ran at Race City, I was quite young, in 1989,” explains Vass of his pavement debut shortly after the much-missed southeast Calgary venue first opened. “I did the National Yamaha RZ Cup race that August. I was running fifth or something, within site of the top three, when I blew my bike up – two strokes need oil, too!”
Vass had originally taken a CMRA-sanctioned racing school on the legendary 1982 mono shock Kawasaki GPz550, but racing seriously was too costly for a young family man. So instead, he helped local racers and met up with all the western fast guys in the paddock.
In 2001 he did a little more racing, aboard a 1987 Yamaha FZR1000, with some success. He also ran in middleweight with the unloved Yamaha YZF600R, again running near the point.
“I was at the front and having fun; we did some Endurance races at the new Stratotech, but I reminded myself I just couldn’t afford it.”
The start of the current Vass era can be traced to 2003, when Willie joined the Calgary-based Blackfoot Coors Light Suzuki program, a powerhouse program on the Parts Canada Superbike Championship as covered on TSN.
“Current Alex Dumas top tuner Patrice Goyette ran the Francis Martin part of the Blackfoot team, and I joined with my focus on the GSX-R600 and support Patrice with the big bikes. We had plenty of fun – we ran the AMA Pro races in California at the start of the season, before spring in Canada, and we learned so much; I got on well with Francis, a real Pro.”
The next major resume move for Vass was a 2004 alignment with top Calgary-based Youngster Chris Peris, fresh from initial big support from Honda. “We built 600 and 750 Suzukis for Chris, but I didn’t travel much. In the US, he was running for the M4 team on Michelins, and he had those tires in Canada as well – there were a few really good races, but maybe we didn’t appreciate we had the best rain tires at the time, and the best rain rider!”
Vass stated that 2005 involved “a whole year of travelling with the Peris group, with my company supporting their team. I think our best race was at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, and we got third overall in Sport Bike against a very deep field. I think we did 39 races in total with three Yamaha R6s; we alternated the bikes for service.
“In between, I would try to pick up my local customers, just like today. That was the first year I was interviewed on TSN!” The Mosport Hindle Exhaust Pro Sport Bike weekend was the 2005 stand out for the Peris effort, with victories in both wet and dry conditions, including success ahead of Kawasaki’s American rainmeister Tom Kipp.
In 2006 Peris arranged for a lightly supported World Super Sport program on a Yamaha R6 and headed to Europe with a Belgian team with some prior Endurance experience. “I went to the last couple of World Superbike rounds that year with those guys,” laughs Vass. “They really needed some chassis support.”
“Again, plenty of fun, but our team owner was not that concerned about racing, at all – he just didn’t care, he was a mad man! Eventually I got vertigo from jet lag and travelling back and forth to my young family, and that didn’t work because by then I was kind of in charge!”
“We did have a good Q session in Assen (in the Netherlands), and we were fast at Philip Island in Australia, but Chris chucked it. We wound up with one Championship point. I slept the rest of 2007; those guys wore me out!”
A quick review of the FIM middleweight records indicates that when Vass arrived in late 2006, his Bikersdays Yamaha Moto 1 Super Sport squad scored their best results of the year in Italy and France, with Peris earning points each time – good enough for a total of 3, to place him 38th in the final standings. The next year, Peris was just out of the points (15th or lower) in the opening rounds and the squad quit for good after 6 races.
The 2008 Vass season was in service of Alberta’s rising start Jeremy Stepper and his Suzuki GSX-R1000 racers. “That was when I worked with Traction Dynamics and Penske, learning the hard way how to build and tune at that level,” confirms Vass. “I was tuning the rider and the bike, and our highlight was a good fifth at Calabogie at the start of the season, when everyone was healthy. We also placed 15th at Elkhart Lake in a Superstock race, again in a deep field.”
The revised AMA Pro Series split the Super Sport Championship into M/X style east and west series in 2009, and Vass took charge of the Yamaha YZF-R6 program of rising star Josh Day. “I was the tuner, not the builder,” continues Vass.
“We ended up winning Super Sport East and then placing second in the shoot out for the overall title. It was a very strong season, a good program.”
Vass once again “stayed home” in 2010, supporting former star racer Clint McBain’s Suzuki effort with stepson Cody Matechuk in Alberta. “Boy, could he launch a motorcycle,” remembers Vass of multi-discipline two-wheeled talent Matechuk. “Again, I didn’t build those bikes, I just tuned them.”
The 2010 season ended with a trip to Macau to support Chris Peris on a first gen BMW S 1000 RR at the Macau street race. “Chris was doing so well, he would have been the top rookie, but he crashed late in the race.”
For the next three years, Vass turned his attention to eastern Canadian rising star Alex Welsh and Suzuki Canada’s CSBK program.
“We had some ex-McCormick bikes, and lots of good things happened, Alex’s first wins, and typically we were second behind Jordan (Szoke), whatever he was riding! But we were troubled by small electronic dramas at the worst times.”
In 2013 Vass also participated in the legendary Buell Superbike twins project, using the team’s specially built 1190 cc Rotax based powerplants: “we went through one engine per session at Laguna Seca, but we had a tractor trailer full of engines!”
“Eventually, Buell were building engines with their cylinder, heads, cams; I spent a month in Wisconsin, it was really an engineering firm that also assembled a few engines and racing motorcycles. The next year they flipped the program over to Larry Pegram, and the whole thing came apart about halfway through when Hero pulled out.”
For 2015 the typical Vass pattern repeated, “I worked locally, and then we gave the new Yamaha YZF-R1 M a debut at C.T.M.P. with Alex Welsh. It should have been a pair of wins, but I took bad advice regarding the front tire. Alex put it on pole but crashed from the front in race one and then came out third in a close race in part two.”
This was the debut of a working partnership with Cartier, who had supported Welsh in the eastern events.
In 2016, Scottish-born Ben Young came home from his semi-successful Super Sport effort in the US to race full time in Canadian Superbike for BMW, after initially considering Yamaha.
Also, during the same period, Vass met Chris Nash from U.K.-based K-Tech suspension after providing tech support for the HSBK Aprilia effort of Italian ace Claudio Corti during pre-season testing. In a road racing world where most team favor Ohlins suspension components, ever since Vass has worked with K-Tech to support the ongoing success of Young with BMW Motorrad.
As well as working to develop Young’s successful program, Vass became an advocate for rising western ace Laing, one of the rare local heroes to join the CSBK tour an immediately make an impression.
“John came to my first shop, a shed really, for a visit,” laughs Vass. “He looked around and looked at me sideways! He has an engineering degree, he’s not stupid, but we hit it off as he zoomed right through the ranks. He was doing it right, right from the start.
“John understands what is needed, and what will be needed,” confirms Vass of his protégé. “I build the motors, share with him how to go with the chassis; he worked for a month in our shop to build his 636.”
Still, the recent run of success with Young is a favourite memory, and Vass loved 2023, when early season issues forced an all-out, come from behind effort to beat the Suzuki effort of Alex Dumas and former Vass co-builder Patrice Goyette.
“It was fun to solve the problems at the start of the year, and then we had to come back, we had to win all the time, and that really put the pressure on the team, and certainly on our rider. Then on the last National weekend at Shannonville, it all turned around, and became one of those things people will always talk about.”
