I shared a shop with Bob for over 10 years. I came into the shop with a background in drag racing but a desire to road race....and "MCF"  was the place to be.  Bob was the most active of the three owners (McCallum, Cullen, Fountain)..  He was in the shop virtually every day, doing his thing.  I had grown up in airport hangers, and at NHRA events where I had worked for Ford. But I had NEVER seen anyone as capable of building or designing anything as Bob.  the guy was amazing. Over the next few years Bob taught me welding, fabrication, composite design and construction, and a myriad of other things required to design and build race cars. My first formula car was designed and built out of that shop.  Bob was renown for his skills: his nickname was Yoda.....and he really WAS Yoda-like....sometimes cryptic, sometimes ascerbic, always involved. I must have driven him nuts. 

He also had some "interesting" quirks. Anybody who knows Bob knows "his shirts"......another thing that was uniquely Bob was his whistling. All day. Every tune known to man. No big issue except, as Bob would launch into a song, my mind would start to follow along, anticipating the next notes....just then, Bob would change the tune!   He would whistle three bars of every tune.....my head would hurt! 

Remember the Dodge van he used when he built the double-decker trailer?  That horn must have been off a CN Freight train! 

We had a ton of "away" races...every one of them an adventure. Remember that "Great Pumpkin" race at Nelson Ledges?  Every session one of us was crashed by the locals....Bob got the worst of it being crashed every session. First we changed out spare suspension arms, till they were all used up. Then Bob started cutting the bent parts out of his selection of broken arms and splicing two or three arms together to make one. Then, finally, after he ran out of "good bits", Bob cut up his tool box for the steel to patch together the arms.....he made every session. That was the weekend Rolf was launched in T3 and tore out his only halfshaft....we searched for an hour or more to find it....as the sun was going down. I was launched at Oak Tree. Russell ended up in the tire wall in the Pulsar. When it was all over, all of us (exhausted) loaded up, and drove home in a convoy so we could all be at work the next morning.  A typical race weekend.

Bob told the story when he was lauched at the Glen. He was so high, flew so far that he cleared half the catch fences!!  He ended up upside down on top of the last row of fences. He told the story "I closed my eyes and the crashing continued...then it got quiet so I thought I should release the belts and get out -  I opened my eyes and realized I was still in the air and was heading for the fences - so I shut my eyes again for a while"   with that slight grin on his face.......

I also remember one of the funniest things I had ever seen.....we had raced at Shannonville for the weekend. We all went into some pizza joint in Belleville on Sunday night....we parked all the trucks and trailers in the big, empty parking lot.  Dinner went well, we all got up to go pay the cashier. Bob was first out into the parking lot. I was close to last.  As I exited the building, I heard this gawdawful noise in the parking lot....squealing tires, racing engine.....some fool had parked in front of Bob's truck and trailer, blocking him in. No problem, Bob just started up the van, pushed his bumper against the offending car, and was proceeding to push it across the parking lot!   I laughed!!!   Bob was more action than words....

Bob's favourite work space was the floor.  Tools spread all around him, there he would be, all knees and ankles working away on some offending part or body panel. I once saw him, over the course of two days, take a crumpled, wrinkled fender from a DeLorean and pound it back out, planish the dents by hand with a selection of hammers and the torch, then he sanded the panel, using the box of used sandpaper we kept under the bench. You see, the DeLorean was bare, brushed-finish stainless steel....so you could not hide any dents or scrapes with body filler and paint. When Bob was done, the fender was new!!  You could not tell where "factory" ended and "repaired" began.

Bob could build engines, build anything from scraps or leftovers, design, weld impeccably, the guy could do anything. And he was fearless: I once spent a day helping him install the lazer projectors in the CN tower.  Here we were, two stories above the top of the tower, cutting a hole in the side of the tower...at one point Bob had to climb up to the hole in the side,...over 1,500 feet up.....I was scared to death just standing on the floor...and here was Bob haf-way out the window.....for safety he had me hold onto his belt!!!!

Then there was the fireworks; Bob worked and gained his explosives license....no biggie. Then there was flying. Bob got his pilots license...no biggie. The guy could do anything he put his mind to.  We ALL were pleased when the runours that Bob and Anne were dating were true.....you two were good to each other and were good FOR each other.  

There are only a few people in the world who anyone can really, truly say changed the trajectory of their lives; Bob was one of those people who affected my racing life, teaching me the safe way to build things, to be organized and committed, and to never accept "good enough".....these qualities have stood me good stead these past 35 years.  Godspeed Bob!!