QThe trophies were cleverly done. After we saw the First Place trophy,
our “let’s just have fun” attitude began to get a little more serious.
QA portion of the 122 entries lined up on Daytona’s pit road
prior to following the pace car out for the opening flag.QAnthony Von Canon joined us again for this race. Anthony is a dis-
abled veteran who was a recipient of a home built by U.S. Veterans
Corps. After he got out of the car he said it was “the second favorite
thing I’ve ever done.” He wouldn’t tell us what the first thing was.QThe Laps of Honor Mustang runs a 2.3L EcoBoost engine from a
late-model Mustang. Crimson Sanders at Innovation Performance
Technologies is the main guy responsible for building the car.QEarly in the day, when the temperature was in the low 90s, we had a bit of an overheating issue that brought us into the garage for a
few minutes. With easing up on the driving, lower afternoon temps, and watching the hood-mounted water temperature gauge to keep it
between 220 and 240 degrees, the problem fixed itself. Pictured from left to right: Jon Marshall; Ron Miller, former fighter pilot and now a
pilot for Southwest; and Mike Ellis of Flyer Defense.SEPTEMBER 2019 29
Daytona, a bucket-list goal
for all of us. The track was
Daytona’s ROVAL that uses
95 percent of the 2.5-mile
tri-oval track in addition to
the infield road course—the
same track layout they
run the 24 Hours of
Daytona on.
We didn’t get to exper-
ience running under the
lights, unfortunately. After
10 hours of endurance
racing, the transmission
refused to come out of Fifth
gear, sending Jon back to
our garage in the pits. What
we thought was a broken
shifter turned out to be
a broken intermediate
shaft inside the T-5 upon
disassembly. Either way,
there wasn’t enough time
to make repairs before the
checkered flag flew, so we
were done for the weekend.
We ended up a DNF with
four hours left and had to
load the car into the trailer
while jealously watching
the other cars blast around
that glorious ROVAL at
speed, under the lights.
That sucked for sure, but
again, we were there to
have fun and turn as many
laps for charity as we could,
so like our early departure
in Atlanta, the mission was
a success.
The good news is that
anyone can do this! Our
Fox is set up as a legit race
car and therefore has a lot