Pelham opens Canada’s first permanent sanctioned drone racing track

Pelham now has something drone racing in Canada had never had before: a permanent, MAAC-sanctioned FPV multirotor field at Gordon L. Klager Park. The new track gives the sport a fixed home instead of another pop-up setup, and that matters because FPV racing lives or dies on repeatable infrastructure, safe sightlines and a place where pilots can return week after week.

The project grew out of a clubhouse demonstration that turned into a serious pitch. Niagara FPV Squad members Abbey Kiyoshi Solomon and Trevor Christensen showed drone racing inside the Fonthill Lions clubhouse, then pressed for exclusive use of part of the park. Robert Youngblut and the Fonthill Lions backed the idea, seeing a group that blended youth leadership, technical skill and the service-minded spirit the club has carried since it was chartered in 1945.

Niagara FPV Squad is not a small backyard outfit. MultiGP lists the chapter in Fenwick, Ontario, with 171 members and 118 events, and the group describes itself as Canada’s first MAAC-designated FPV group and the country’s only Tier 1 MultiGP chapter. That scale gives the Pelham track a built-in operating core. It is not just a place to fly, but a base for recurring races, organized training and the kind of schedule that can support rankings, rules and sponsorships.

For new fans, FPV means first-person view. Pilots wear goggles with screens inside and fly from the drone’s camera perspective using a remote control, which makes the racing look more like a cockpit battle than a park pastime. That setup also explains why a permanent venue matters. A fixed course lets pilots tune machines, measure laps, test gates and build safer habits instead of improvising around temporary layouts.

The track also plugs into a bigger educational pipeline. Niagara FPV Squad has already worked with the science department at E.L. Crossley Secondary School to form a high school FPV racing team, and 16 students are expected to build, tune, learn to fly and eventually race drones through that program. At the national level, MAAC says it brings together model aeromodelling enthusiasts across Canada and uses its FPV committee, along with safety, radio-spectrum and multirotor groups, to shape policy and recommendations. Its sanctioned events pages already show FPV and drone racing happening on municipal land and in parks elsewhere in Canada, which makes Pelham look less like an experiment and more like the template. MultiGP, which calls itself the world’s largest drone racing league and FPV community, says Canada’s first-ever series marked the start of a national league structure. This track gives that structure a home base.