The theme for Sunday’s Daytona 500, clearly, is how NASCAR pushed its desperate search for the next new star to the front of the Great American Race. Five of the eight drivers starting in the first four rows are 24 or younger.
What is this, a stock-car race or a homecoming parade?
Then there’s the fellow starting 40th in the 40-car field, Mark Thompson. As well as being from Cartersville and choosing to make his first-ever run in the 500 his last-ever race, Thompson also completely throws off the cute next-gen theme. Really bloats the average age of the field, too.
“I’ve had a couple of accomplishments in life, (and now) I’ll be the oldest driver in the history of the Daytona 500,” Thompson said.
“It’s probably a record I’ll hold for a while since everyone is retiring at 43 (referencing Dale Earnhardt Jr.).”
Thompson is only four years younger than NASCAR itself, which dates him as 66. He's fit, trim and possessed of a pilot's quiet surety. No carnival sharpie could accurately guess his age - every one would go way low. But he's still 66.
He’s not just breaking the Daytona 500’s gray ceiling, he’s obliterating it. Dave Marcus, whose habit was to wear wing-tip shoes when he raced, was the former record-holding coot. And he was a baby by comparison, just shy of 61.
A veteran of 100 ARCA races, four Xfinity Series races and just two Cup races, Thompson has turned laps at Daytona before in those lesser series. Spent a few weeks in the nearby Halifax Medical Center, too, after going bumper-over-tea-kettle during a 1994 ARCA race. His ARCA experience in 2018’s Speed Week was less painful, but almost as dramatic when he got caught up in a last-lap wreck that ended with his ride wrapped in flame. They threw an impromptu barbecue for his ARCA going-away. It was a hard way to get his picture in the local paper.
But Thompson never sniffed the Daytona 500 until the opportunity just kind of wafted into his garage. After Thompson ran the Fall Cup race at Talladega last year, a friend mentioned that he had a chance to buy one of the Richard Petty team’s old superspeedway cars (it was switching from Ford to Chevy). A rather audacious idea was born.
“(Cup officials) would give me my ARCA number, 66. I’m 66 years old. And it’s kind of time to retire from racing. What better way to retire than to drive car 66, being 66 years old, the oldest competitor in the history of Daytona?” he said.
And with there being a shortage of cars for this Daytona 500 – only 40 entered, so none would be bumped through qualifying – Thompson would be guaranteed a spot in Sunday’s race.
So, now, all of a sudden, he is the hotel lounge singer ending his career at Carnegie Hall.
You see, while all these other drivers were approaching this racing thing as a career, Thompson was building his own company, the Cartersville-based Phoenix Air. It specializes in difficult airlifts – like the-rescue-of-Ebola-victims difficult. It does a good deal of military contracting work, as well. That’s the name splashed across his car, so consider Sunday one of the spoils of his success.
No one in the Daytona 500 field was born when Thompson graduated from high school in Atlanta and then made the call to enlist in the Army as the Vietnam War raged. To these drivers, the draft is just a racing maneuver.
Ultimately, his decision to become an Army helicopter pilot was more pragmatic than romantic.
“I knew that flying was better than walking. And being an officer was better than being enlisted. I wasn’t interested in being a pilot. I just wasn’t interested in humping a gun in the bush. It worked out,” he said.
As a pilot, Thompson still considers himself elite. “I would put my flying skills up against anyone in the world,” he said.
As a race-car driver, especially at this level, he is more circumspect about his relative skill level.
“I’m not a neophyte. And I’m not an idiot. I know 35, 36 of these guys, this is what they do for a living,” Thompson said. “What I do for a living is fly. I’m not going to have as good a car, as good a team, be as sharp as them. I want to have a nice race. The car is handling pretty well. I’m not some bright-eyed 23-year-old with expectations of winning the Daytona 500.”
With no back-up car, Thompson has been tiptoeing through the lead-up to Sunday’s race. When his car developed a nasty vibration in one of Thursday’s two qualifying races, he pulled out early rather than risk a crash. For the same reason, he has severely cut back his practice time on the track.
What do his two grown children think of this last hurrah on the biggest stage. Do they possibly believe him crazy? “They probably do (to themselves), but they’re OK with it,” Thompson said.
As for his girlfriend, “She’s happy this will be the last race,” he said.
His strategy Sunday is pretty simple, really: Do nothing to embarrass himself.
Beyond that, hang back.
“I don’t have a 12-second pit crew. If I were try to move up during the race, when I’d come into the pits, I’d go to the back because I don’t have the fast pit crew,” he said.
“I’m enough of a realist to know it wouldn’t do any good to move up because I’m going to go back when I come into the pits. But after the last pit stop is over – if I’m still out there – then I can see what we can do.
“If I had a strategy, it would be to try to exist after the last pit stop.”
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