Mike Stone
Toronto, Canada
day.mo.1944 - 25.Feb.2005
The above photo was taken in 1984 at Oswego Speedway and it shows me (yup, I really did have a 30-inch waist back then) with my hand on the shoulder of Mike Stone, a supermodified driver from Toronto.
As you can tell from the look in Mike's eyes, his adrenalin was also pumping that day and it had nothing to do with Red Bull. He'd taken my car out for practice before I was scheduled to get into it and he'd flipped it on the backstretch and he was thanking his lucky stars that he'd gotten out of it in one piece. (Although I was expressing sympathy and was relieved that Mike hadn't been hurt, a cartoon bubble over my head would have contained the following words: "Look what you did to my car, you wacko!")
I first met Mike in 1977. I'd seen him around Oswego and we'd bumped into each other at Mosport where we'd both gone to watch a Can-Am race (in which a young Gilles Villeneuve was entered). We took his van to a hill overlooking turn two and split some wine and cheese. (We laughed about that for years afterward: at Oswego, it was beer and hot dogs; at Mosport, it was wine and cheese. We liked to fit in.)
Mike pretty much gave up racing after the roll-over and concentrated on a courier business he owned in Southern Ontario. In his later years, he was employed as a youth counsellor for a Toronto social agency.
Mike passed away several weeks ago, of leukemia. He was 61. He helped a lot of people over the years and he had many friends who will miss him. He was a good guy.
. . . written in March of 2005 by Norris McDonald
As you can tell from the look in Mike's eyes, his adrenalin was also pumping that day and it had nothing to do with Red Bull. He'd taken my car out for practice before I was scheduled to get into it and he'd flipped it on the backstretch and he was thanking his lucky stars that he'd gotten out of it in one piece. (Although I was expressing sympathy and was relieved that Mike hadn't been hurt, a cartoon bubble over my head would have contained the following words: "Look what you did to my car, you wacko!")
I first met Mike in 1977. I'd seen him around Oswego and we'd bumped into each other at Mosport where we'd both gone to watch a Can-Am race (in which a young Gilles Villeneuve was entered). We took his van to a hill overlooking turn two and split some wine and cheese. (We laughed about that for years afterward: at Oswego, it was beer and hot dogs; at Mosport, it was wine and cheese. We liked to fit in.)
Mike pretty much gave up racing after the roll-over and concentrated on a courier business he owned in Southern Ontario. In his later years, he was employed as a youth counsellor for a Toronto social agency.
Mike passed away several weeks ago, of leukemia. He was 61. He helped a lot of people over the years and he had many friends who will miss him. He was a good guy.
. . . written in March of 2005 by Norris McDonald
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1967 |
June 1968 |
1969 |
1974 |
Mike would be remembered by many as the owner-driver of the black number 511 and 51 supers and one of the early Canadian drivers to make the weekly trek to the big 'O' before it became the popular thing to do". I had the pleasure of designing a lot of that car as well as building much of it and co-owning it with Mike. That same car was later reconfigured and renumbered and was the first supermodified Brad Lichty ever drove. (written by Dave Humeniuk) |
The number 51 T.Q. midget of Mike Stone taken at the Indianapolis Speedrome in 1980. From retrorockets and the archives of Dave Humeniuk |
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