The pattern established itself early. The Sports Car Club broke ground on Eagle Mountain in Coquitlam in 1957 and held the first race at Westwood on 26 July 1959 - the first purpose-built permanent road course in Canada, 2.897 kilometres and eight turns carved into a hillside. It lasted until 1990, when the lease ended and the land became a housing development and a golf course. The drag racers fared no better. The original Mission Raceway Park opened in 1965 and ran until 1978, adding a motocross track in 1973, before the District of Mission decided the site would serve better as an industrial park. Both clubs were left holding trophies and no pavement.

What followed the 1978 closure was not racing but paperwork - years of negotiation and legal wrangling before the association secured ground near the Fraser River. The new Mission Raceway Park opened on 14 March 1992. Recognition came quickly for a facility that had spent more than a decade in limbo: the NHRA awarded the strip a National Open in 1993, and then the Division 6 Track of the Year award five years running from 1994 through 1998. It took the same award three more times, 2005 through 2007. For a quarter-mile strip operated by a volunteer car club rather than a corporation, that is an extraordinary run, and it was earned by people who had already proven they would wait fourteen years for a start line.

The road racers arrived as tenants of the drag racers, an arrangement that sounds fragile and has now lasted more than thirty years. Having lost Westwood in 1990, the Sports Car Club worked out terms with the B.C. Custom Car Association and opened the River's Edge Road Course at Mission in 1992. It was not a racing circuit at first. For two years it ran only driver training, letting students learn a 2.2-kilometre, nine-turn layout with the Fraser sliding past beyond the fence line. Full road racing operations began in 1994. In 2022 the circuit took a new name, the Speed-Fanatics Motorsports Circuit, though a good many people who have lapped it for three decades still call it River's Edge.

In 2008 the circuit was rebuilt through its final sequence. The old left-hand turn 7 became a left-right combination, turn 8 flipped from a right to a left, and turn 9 was made longer and wider - changes that fed cars onto the main straight carrying considerably more speed. On 12 June 2009, during a track day, Cam Gillispie, a 33-year-old motorcyclist riding a Suzuki, left the circuit at the exit of turn 9 and struck the outside wall. He did not survive. The following year the track was reconfigured for motorcycles, restoring a left-hand turn 7 and a right-hand turn 8 leading into the original turn 9. Cars still run the 2008 layout. Two configurations now share one ribbon of asphalt, and the reason for the second one is a rider who went out on a June afternoon to enjoy himself.

Mission is unusual in that nobody here is a promoter. The B.C. Custom Car Association owns the property and runs the NHRA-sanctioned quarter-mile itself. The Sports Car Club of British Columbia operates the road course independently. The Lower Mainland Motocross Club runs a three-kilometre motocross track on the same grounds under its own management. Three organisations, three completely different disciplines, one access road. On a busy weekend the sound layers strangely: the concussive pulse of a dragster launching, the rising-falling drone of a car working through nine turns, the ragged buzz of motocross bikes over jumps - all of it audible from the dike path along the river, where people walk dogs and pretend not to be listening.