This Ontario flower farmer spends downtime tracking her Golf R

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When the dahlias disobey and the lisianthus get lazy, Heather Kent takes a break from working on her five-acre flower farm in Wainfleet, Ontario. Does she head to the spa or the beach? Nope. Kent slides into her Volkswagen Golf R and goes racing.

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Just half-an-hour away at Toronto Motorsports Park (TMP) in Cayuga, Kent puts on her helmet, straps in, and does a deep focus on the corners, the straights, and the consistency needed to shave seconds off her lap times.

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This Ontario flower farmer spends downtime tracking her Golf R Back to video

It is a great release from the demands of running Feeder Flower Farm, where she and her husband Jay often work 14 hours a day. But no doubt her followers on Instagram were shocked to see a video recently of her roaring around the track.

It’s a case of Flower Girl meets Girl Racer.

“My dad says I got up to 168 kilometres an hour on the straight the last time I was there,” Kent says as we chat at the edge of a long row of zinnias.

Kent grew up in a family with a fondness for cars. Her dad is on a motorcycle tour in Europe right now. “Soon as he gets back, he’ll be putting his 1972 Alfa Romeo Spyder back together. It’s in parts right now,” Kent says. Growing up, Kent’s dad was always taking the Spyder to slalom races, and coaching her younger brother in go-kart racing at Goodwood Kartways in Stouffville. Then he discovered open lapping at TMP and started taking his daughter along.

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“I was often a passenger, but then I got to drive his Porsche Boxster Spyder. It was so much fun, but it’s not like driving your own car where you feel comfortable to push it,” she says.

Kent has always had a love for a fast hatchback. In 2016, she test-drove a VW Golf R and fell in love with it. “We couldn’t afford it, but I thought about it daily.”

By this time, Kent had been through a lot of heartache. Her mother died in 2016 of gastric cancer at the age of 61. It was her mother who nurtured Kent’s love of flowers and gardening.

The gene mutation that caused her mother’s cancer was also present in Heather, so she made the tough decision to have her stomach removed to stop any chance of getting the same disease. But the strongest motivation for surgery was the birth of her son River in 2015. “The most important thing was to live my life for my son,” she says.

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And Heather Kent is full of life and passion. At the age of 37, she exudes the energy of a teenager. Tending to the flowers in the field, preparing bouquets for the farm stand, designing arrangements for weddings, supplying florists with cut flowers, all tasks built into the long work days she shares with her husband.

But after the life-changing events of 2016, she gained a new appreciation for living fully. “I came to a realization that life’s short, and I thought I want the car that I want.” So, she bought a 2018 Golf R with a six-speed manual transmission.

“It’s completely stock,” she says, so it was gratifying when she posted lap times faster than another modified Golf R that was on the track the same day. “My dad has really helped me improve, advising me on braking, on looking farther ahead on the course, and really studying the track layout.”

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Kent has been to the track about 10 times since buying the Golf R. While her technical skills improve, her strongest talent, she says, is her guts. “I’m really not afraid of speed, I’m not scared to try a new line,” Kent says.

Like many lucky enough to take their cars to the track, Kent has found it has made her a safer street driver. She knows her car’s capabilities, and driving on the track gets rid of the “need for speed” elsewhere. “My car has 300 horsepower, [so] you can barely get out of third gear most of the time, but I’m happy just putzing around now.”

Looking beyond lapping at TMP, Kent would love to try rally driving, but not in her Golf R. “I really don’t want to beat it up, get stone chips — it’s like my second child.”

While she is passionate about the flower business, going to the track adds balance to her life she says: “Racing at the track, it’s so completely not farming.”

Flowers meet fast cars — what’s not to love?