Blue Thunder, Stephen Cox Interview

Introduction

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Guest Introduction

1:00Coming up today on this episode of Ford Mustang, the Early Years Podcast. It was so discouraging. I bet I went the first six, eight years of my driving career, and I think I won a total of two races. It was just so discouraging until I got with some more experienced people. And I got to tell you, Richard Petty was one of them. And I have had the privilege to interview him a lot. And I'm not saying we're bosom buddies or anything, but I mean, he knows, he recognizes me.

1:32And he passed along. He told me one time, he said, you know, I never felt like I had to be a better driver. If I could just be as good as the other guys, but make my car a little bit better than theirs. And I really took that to heart, and I listened to guys with more experience than me, and I realized that it doesn't matter if you're talented or even not talented. You're not going anywhere until your car can run up front. Forget the driver. Get a car that can run up front. Only at that point are you going to succeed, regardless of your talent level.

2:08Welcome to the Ford Mustang First Generation The Early Years Podcast. Every week, we will have conversations with collectors, experts, weekend warriors, and those in the know when it comes to first generation ponies. Start your engines and let's go.

Stephen Cox Interview

2:30Okay, Ford Mustang community. Our guest today is one of the most versatile racers in motor sports. His name is Stephen Cox, and he has competed on dirt and on asphalt, ovals and road courses, open wheel, stock cars, and even off-road desert racing. And he's won in all of them, over 34 career victories. Doesn't look like he's old enough to have 34 career victories, but he is here. 124 top five finishes. Stephen's resume is as deep as it is diverse. He's also the CEO of Sopwith Motorsports Television Productions, a familiar face on Fox and NBCSN, and the proud owner of Blue Thunder, a Fox body Mustang with its own racing pedigree.

3:09I'm excited to talk to him. Stephen, welcome to the podcast. Well, thank you. I've been looking forward to this all week, Doug. I'm excited to chat with you. First off, I got to start here. 43 years. Were you the original owner of Blue Thunder? Because if I did the math, it sounds like you might have been the second owner. You're exactly right. I'm the second owner of Blue Thunder. It was purchased by a guy who had just gone out and got himself a traveling sales job. And he thought he was like making tons of money. Now I can have what I want. So what does he buy? A base model, four-cylinder, non-air-conditioned, manual transmission, 88 horsepower, 1980 Mustang.

3:49And he drives the wheels off of it. He put 38,000 miles on that car in 16 months. And that's when I bought it. Well, I got to say this because I'm about to date myself for just a quick second. I started driving in 1980, and my buddy Fred bought a 1980 Fox body, the four-cylinder, but it was automatic with air conditioning. And that thing, you know, Ford Mustang community, you know I love my Mustangs, but that car was a dog.

4:19There were dogs. And, you know, if he had the automatic, though, I could have beat him in a drag race by a car length and three horsepower. I could have done it. So get started.

Classic Car Background

4:30And what brought you into the world of classic cars to begin with? And then what attracted you to this particular Mustang that you knew you were going to have to do all sorts of rebuilding with out of the gate? And a young age that you were at that point, I'm sure, as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had just started driving, and, you know, I was out looking to trade in a Mustang II. So you can only go up from there, right? I don't know. We might have some doubters in the world there. Somebody might say, I kind of dig that Mustang II.

5:01I'm not a Mustang II hater. I had two of them, and they both had the Colonial V6 engine. So if you can handle that, you don't hate anything. Okay, I got it. So I wanted to trade the car in, and I was getting ready to go to college, and I thought, I'm going to need something I can put some miles on. And this was a really reliable car, the 2.3 liter four-cylinder. It was not new then. You know, I mean, it had been around a while. It was very reliable. It was going to get decent mileage, and I had always loved Mustangs, and I thought, you know, this is the one I can afford right now, and I never thought that 40 years later I'd still have it, but, you know, but here we are.

5:37Now, that's how I got introduced to Blue Thunder. Now, I was always a Mustang fan. When I was five years old in the late 60s, early 70s, my dad had an HO scale slot car set up out in the garage, and he would take me out there, and we would race slot cars together. And so, I mean, I always loved cars. One of the cars was a teal 1965 Mustang Coupe that came with the Aurora set, and he had that car, and I remember it. In fact, I've still got it out in my garage now.

6:09And so, I guess I just – Mustangs were always familiar to me, and then how that translated into being in the classic car community and kind of being out there in the public a little bit was a producer out of Indianapolis that I had worked with on ESPN many, many times before. He called me up, and he said, Stephen, would you like to do a classic car show? And I said, well, tell me more about it. But, I mean, yeah. And he goes, well, you know, brush up on the cars that you know. He goes, I know that you know Fords and Torino's and this, that, and the other. And he goes, it's called Mecham Auctions, and we would like you to come out and be a part of it.

6:42And so that – I accepted, and it lasted a great 16-year run. It was a lot of fun. That's awesome.

Auction Experience

6:49What a great story. I want to talk about Mecham and maybe some of your auction experience because I'm sure there are many people, especially with valuations the way they are today with any classic car, but especially things like a classic Ford Fastback, a Mustang Fastback. You know, everybody's going to the auctions looking for the deal. And unfortunately, sometimes when you go to these auctions, you just need one person bidding against you to not get the deal because they want that car as badly as you do. But before we get to that, I want to go back to that early age that you were.

7:21You know, most guys like you and me, and I didn't get into the racing world or the performance world, but most guys like you and me at 16, we were doing donuts in the high school parking lot. And it would amount to our parents getting called by either the authorities at the school or the cops, hey, you got to come pick up your son because he was doing donuts or he was caught speeding, and we're not giving him back his car without you being here. Or how did you take that enthusiasm, which I'm sure you had just like me, and turn that into a career rather than, you know, I really got to grow up and get out of this world?

7:53Well, I'll tell you how that happened. Here's the story, Doug, because that's a very good question. When I was in high school, and this is going to sound horribly vain, but in order to answer your question, I have to tell you. It's okay, do it. I was a high school athlete, and I was the star of every single team. Wow. And, you know, to this day, I'm the leading scorer in basketball history at the school. I was a wide receiver on the football team, an all-state soccer player, just everything. So I got out of high school, and I realized I can't do this forever.

8:27I'm really not good enough to make it to the next level. I was just a big fish in a small pond. So what am I going to do? So I did not want to go out and become a plumber. Nothing wrong with plumbers. Plumbers, you're great people. We like flushing toilets, but that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to find some way to stay in competition. And I thought, you know, I've had this cool Torino. I've got a Mustang that I really love now. My dad and I went to Paragon Speedway in Indiana every Saturday night of the world. And I thought, I can drive race cars, and I can get into the media and try to work my way into the motorsports and classic car media.

9:06So that's what I did. It was all about avoiding a real job. I'd always been a jock, and I didn't want to go to work. So that's the honest truth. When did you know that that was going to stick? Because oftentimes, you know, the pie in the sky, the 35,000-foot look at getting into media or getting to auto racing or performance or any of that, it's a pipe dream that just never hits reality for many people. When did you know that for you it was going to stick? I still don't know if it's going to stick. After all these years, I went into radio, and, you know, I had to take a job in news and be in a disc jockey in order to get to announce the local Grand Prix out somewhere in eastern Indiana, Connersville or something like that.

9:52And I just had to take whatever job I had to take to get as close to it as I could. And I probably went for six or eight years in the media before I got a call from ESPN2, and they have a go-kart show called Saturday Night Lightning. Danica Patrick, by the way, was one of the racers on that show. We had several future NASCAR stars and stuff like that on that show. And so I had to stay as close as I could to it, both as a driver and an announcer, until it could become full-time.

10:22That took years. Now, what an interesting career path. Also, now, so create the overlap for our community that might be thinking, okay, well, there is, I understand racing, and I understand performing and maybe going from racing to being a broadcaster in the world of racing. But then bring me over to Mecham. How does that, how does something like that transpire? Well, the work that I had done on ESPN2 was for three or four different production companies. Most of the time, when you're talent on a major network show, you don't work directly for the network.

10:55The network will have its roster of people that it will call on for shows that they're particularly interested in or have a financial stake in. But most of the shows that you see, the talent is hired by the production company. And I had worked for three or four different production companies across ESPN and ESPN2 in the 90s and early 2000s. And one of the producers named Terry Lingner out of Indianapolis, he was one of those guys. And he had gotten a hold of Dana Mecham and said, you got a great auction here, but it's really kind of small and you're getting overrun by a number of the big players out there.

11:31We can put you on television. And once they came to a deal, Terry started looking for talent and he didn't go to the network. He went back to his roster of talent that he had worked with in years past, and I was on that roster. So it kind of was a backdoor entry. How do you feel like, or what do you think about, you know, technology has completely taken over the world of auction houses nowadays. I mean, Mecham and certainly Barrett-Jackson, two of the huge, huge auction houses that are there.

12:01But then you have organizations like Bring a Trailer that do everything online. You don't have an announcer in that particular case. Does that, do you think, help that world of auctioning? Or do you think it, do you think it hurts it? It hurts the auction world, but it helps guys like you and I who love classic cars and want to get decent prices on them. I'll tell you how it happens. In the auction world, a lot of times you're going to have seven, eight, and the baseline for some auctions is 10%. That is the fee for the consigner and for the buyer.

12:32So if you want to buy a car for $100, you pay $110, and then the consigner who consigned it gives 10 out of his pocket that he received to the auction house. So it's 20% is how much is it. That's the increase in the price, depending on how you want to count it. But that's the basic math here. So there was very recently, man, I can't forget if it was, I can't remember, is it a Ferrari or a Lamborghini? It's like a million-dollar car. Somebody put it on Bring a Trailer, Doug, and they paid something like a $5,000 or $7,000 fee.

13:10Now, a million-dollar car would have cost $200,000 in auction fees. The entire auction world knows about that deal, and everybody is looking at it. So what that's going to do, it's going to put economic pressure on the auction houses to become more competitive with their consignment and their buyer fees. And at the same time, the people in Bring a Trailer and other sites like it are going to look at this and say, it's a million-dollar sale.

13:41We've got $7,000 or $8,000? Are you kidding me? And they're going to meet in the middle. I think that's long-term. I think that's what's going to happen. Well, I think also, I think that the auction world is really, right now, post-COVID, COVID was a time when anybody that had a couple of nickels to rub together, they were heading to whatever auctions that they could, whether it was online or personal, face-to-face, in order to make their purchases. I find the market is a lot softer now. As a guy that likes to buy and sell, buy, fix up, and sell some of these vehicles, I'm finding it a little bit more challenging over the last couple of turns that I've tried to make with these cars.

14:20Yeah. You know, right during the end of the entire COVID narrative, you had enormous amounts of funny money being printed out of thin air and flushed out into the economy. And then the funny thing is, everybody wakes up two years later and says, well, why is there so much inflation? Duh. I mean, seriously. And that drove the prices of everything up. But the people who understood the inevitable result of inflating the money supply, they were the ones who figured it out and said, we need to be buying toward the end of this narrative.

15:00Because when the narrative dries up and when the public stops accepting the narrative and when this money gets out into the economy, all the sales are going to slow down and all the prices are going to go up. So you're one of the guys who saw this early and you're one of the smart ones because you're exactly right. It's harder to flip right now. It's a little bit harder, but that's okay if you pay cash for them and you just keep them on your driveway or in your storage place and just slowly make improvements. I think the market will come back. I just think it's just a matter of, well, you know, some of the market, it hasn't softened yet.

15:36You know, you try to go and get a 67, 68 Ford Mustang Fastback right now, you're not going to pay anything south of probably $60,000 or $70,000 for one that's in good shape. Well, the market is just reflecting the economy. The classic car market is just reflecting the economy. That's all in the world it's doing. And when you've got inflation going high, even before this administration, and I didn't like either of them, so I got no dog in this fight. But, you know, even before this administration, you had inflation going crazy.

16:06And now we've added tariff inflation on top of that. It's just going to take a while to turn around and it's going to be tough right now. And the classic car market is going to reflect what's happening in the overall economics of the country. Yeah, I appreciate you taking a trip down memory lane. I know you didn't come here to talk about auction prices and valuations and stuff, but I appreciate you humoring me because it's always part of that in my brain, the conversation that I want to have with people that are in the industry. It's inseparable. You can't separate the classic car market from the economic situation in which it functions.

16:39Agreed. Agreed.

Racing Career

16:40Let's go back to your career for a second because I'm really curious. You took that winningest or highest scoring athlete at your high school and you translated that into the world of racing with dozens and dozens of victories and a lot of course records. How does that translate? So how easy or difficult was it to learn this new skill, which was getting behind a wheel and actually racing? Man, it was so hard. It was such a learning curve because I realized that being a talented athlete only takes you so far.

17:17You can only drive to the end of the race car. Once the race car won't go any faster, you can be the best athlete in the world, have the best hand-to-eye coordination, have all the experience in the world as a driver, and you cannot make that car go one mile an hour faster than what it's doing because the laws of physics takes over. And it took me, it was so discouraging. I bet I went the first six, eight years of my driving career, and I think I won a total of two races. It was just so discouraging until I got with some more experienced people.

17:50And I got to tell you, Richard Petty was one of them, and I have had the privilege to interview him a lot. And I'm not saying we're bosom buddies or anything, but I mean, he knows, he recognizes me, and he passed along. He told me one time, he said, you know, I never felt like I had to be a better driver if I could just be as good as the other guys, but make my car a little bit better than theirs. And I really took that to heart, and I listened to guys with more experience than me, and I realized that it doesn't matter if you're talented or even not talented.

18:26You're not going anywhere until your car can run up front. Forget the driver. Get a car that can run up front. Only at that point are you going to succeed, regardless of your talent level. All right. So that's an interesting, I was thinking it was going to potentially go the other way. How much of it is the man, and how much of it is the machine, and what I'm thinking I'm hearing you say is there's a lot of machine that's involved, and I was thinking maybe it was more mental. So talk to me about that. No, and some of it is mental, but especially, and it depends on the type of racing.

19:00For instance, in stock car racing, when that car tells you it's done, you can put a better driver in and maybe get a few more tenths. But if you keep trying to drive that past what it's capable of doing, you're just going to make a bigger hole in the wall. You've got to go back to the pits, talk to your crew chief, make adjustments on the chassis, change the weight transfer on the car, change the springs, use a spring rubber, whatever it is you're going to do, and go back out. You've got to keep working on the car. Now, in endurance racing that I'm in right now, you're with a team of guys, and you'll drive the car for two hours, then you'll come in, and while they change tires or brakes or gas up or whatever, you change drivers as well.

19:44And then the next driver goes out for two hours and so forth. So you've got an eight to 24-hour race. In those races, the crew chief has to shoot toward the center. He can't put the car on the very, very ragged edge and make it just as fast as it can possibly be because maybe the weakest driver on the roster is not going to do well with that. So you have to shoot toward the center. And at that point, it becomes the mental game that you're talking about. It becomes really focusing and playing the mental game and have that mental acuity to focus on every single turn because on a road course, if you mess up turn six, it's going to take you to turn 10 to get back in the groove.

20:22So it's really a different game entirely than short track racing was. So let's talk about that for a second. So stock car racing versus endurance racing, obviously, you have a lot longer period of time to make up any mistakes that are made, especially if you have other teammates that aren't quite as talented as one that's on the team. Is there a preference for you? Obviously, you're in the endurance side of things right now. Is that what you prefer? You know, I love them both, and I really am missing stock car racing right now. But the truth of the matter is, if you look at, you know, the number of wins and championships over my personal record, it's more in road racing and endurance racing.

21:00So I don't know. Maybe I'm just not as good a stock car racer. Maybe I'm not. I don't know. But right now, the doors are open, and my sponsors, Stable Brand, Fuel Stabilizer, 303 Products, G's Up Collector Cars, JR Fastener Corporation, Cars and Convos, they kind of want to go that direction. And those doors are open to me, and they enjoy it, and I enjoy it, and we're really, really successful right now.

21:32We've won seven races in the last year and a half, and thanks primarily to Wittenauer Racing, I got to be a small part of their national championship last season. So, road racing. Just road racing. Why leave when things are going well? You know, why? Yeah, I get it. I get it. So you've been doing this for, let's see, you're probably in your 30s right now. So you've been doing this. Yeah, I wish. You've been doing this for decades. How long can somebody keep their racing helmet on?

22:05I thought I would have been done by now, and I keep getting offers, so I'm going to keep taking them. And Bob Schacht, a buddy of mine named Bob Schacht, my son married his daughter, and so we're in-laws. And Bob ran the NASCAR Winston Cup Series in the 1980s. Now, Bob is 10 to 15 years older than me, and he's still racing. And I'll tell you a great story. I was at the Hallup Motor Racing Circuit probably 10, 12 years ago.

22:37Went out there and just had a great weekend, won our class, won the race. And they had a special meeting in Victory Lane, and they called everybody over. There was a guy there. Now, granted, this is amateur racing at a small level, but the guy was 88 years old, Doug, and he was retiring that day from racing. And he wasn't running up front. He wasn't running competitive for a win, but he was out there turning decent laps, and he was 88 years old. So I don't know how long.

23:08There's my target. Now you know what I'm shooting for, right? My mom at 92 is still driving, and I'm always worried when she goes out there on the road. She doesn't do the highways anymore, but she does the back roads, and she knows them like the back of her hand. It's very, very familiar. Well, I've got a complete workout routine. You know, I'm on it three weeks before every race. So I don't know. We'll just see how long it goes, right? So scariest moment that you've experienced on the track? Oh, that's easy. And it's a pretty gnarly story, so I'll just summarize very quickly.

23:39We had a – what I was told later by the crew was a fuel pump problem driving a Porsche at Circuit of the Americas in the World Racing League in 2016. The car caught fire in the middle of the backstretch, and what had happened was a lot of that fuel had been vaporized, and it came into the cockpit. Soaked me, soaked my uniform, and when it went up, it wasn't just the car that was on fire. It was me that was on fire. The entire right side of my body ended up with really severe third-degree burns.

24:12Was in the – they flew me by helicopter straight into critical care in San Antonio's burn unit. So that was a pretty rough day. That was a scary moment. How does one get the courage to get back behind the wheel because that's where you are now, and that was nearly 10 years ago. So how did that transition happen? It took me 15 weeks to get back in a race car, and while I was in the hospital, I had somebody tell me a story that answers your question specifically.

24:44This guy was working in Vietnam, so he was quite a bit older than me, and he was an elderly gentleman, and he told me this story. He said he was working at a medical unit in Vietnam, but he wasn't in Vietnam. He was stateside, and the soldiers would come back, and he said the ones who desperately wanted to get back to their units are the ones who healed first and quickest because there was something out there for them.

25:14Right, and there was something out there for me, and so I ended up, I think, 11 days in the hospital, the first four in critical condition, I think, and 15 weeks later, I had bandages all over my face, and I had to pull my helmet apart and kind of twist my head in sideways so as not to touch the right half of my face. But I got back in a race car, and I had the right arm from fingertips all the way up to the shoulder was completely wrapped so that I could get inside my fire suit, and we went out and set a track record that day and set on the pole.

25:50So being driven like that, it'll save your life. Having that next thing out there that I'm not trying to recover, I'm trying to get back to work, I'm trying to get back to what I love, that will save your life. Understood, understood. Behind, Stephen, behind every amazing race car driver is someone that is supporting them. Who's your inspiration, who's your support mechanism, who's your cheerleader outside of, obviously, your technical team?

26:21Yeah, well, my wife has always been my biggest cheerleader, and my dad has been my biggest mentor and followed my career and propped up my career and bought tires and gas when I didn't have the money to do it when I was a kid. And so I would really say my dad has been the most instrumental person and the single person that I could point to and say, I have a career because of this person. That's definitely my dad to this day, even though he doesn't go out to all the races like he used to, he sits home and watches the live scoring and logs into, you know, racehero.io or whatever, and watches everything, keeps up on every minute of it.

27:04Still my biggest supporter. And, you know, he taught me how to drive when I was a kid on the street. Uh, and he just has, has been, and the funny thing is my dad didn't, he wasn't a racer. He raced for like a season or two with me just in the car a handful of times. He, he wasn't really a racer. He didn't know how to set up a race car. He didn't know anything more than I did about it, but he was, he was a dad and proud of his son. I think that's what dads do. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So those in our community might want to know this because, uh, because they may not know this already.

27:38Um, what's your daily, what are you driving daily? Uh, I, uh, I drive blue thunder more than you think it gets out of a truck, but, um, uh, my daily is a 2003 first year BMW Z4 roadster. And I bought that particular car because for three reasons, number one, it was a first year model. And I just think they're beautiful. Number two, because it was manual transmission and I didn't want, I would say bad things about anybody who got the, okay.

28:09I wouldn't really do that. But I don't want to lose my self-respect. Okay. I need a five speed. And the last reason was I found a specific model, Doug, that, that the original owner of this car had ordered both the luxury package and the sport package on the same car. So I snapped it up. Wow. That's great. And, and, uh, how often do you, uh, how many miles that you have on that BMW? I have 213,000 miles on it and I have driven it to races or auctions from Indiana to California twice to Las Vegas, twice Indiana to Daytona, twice Indiana to Sebring in Florida, twice Indiana to Dallas and Fort Worth two or three times.

28:52It's been everywhere. I know we talked about this before I hit record, but I'm curious, um, where you are with this. Um, you know, we do a lot of this, uh, uh, out of, out of the, just the pure passion for the, the, the driving community in the car, in the car culture. Um, sometimes we have a limit to that. What's the stuff that you leave to somebody else to fix on your cards and what's the stuff that you do on your own? And maybe it's everything you let everybody else do everything. Most of it. Honestly, I, I found out very early in my racing career that a car runs much better when the only thing I touch is the steering wheel.

29:28So instead of me being under the car, I need to be inside at driving. That's the only small shred of talent I even might have. And so, uh, when it comes to some basic, well, interior now the interior of my cars, I do that myself all the way down to the carpet, take the headliner out. I've had, uh, the Mustangs dash out 15, 20 times, more times than I can count all the way down to nothing. I'm really comfortable working in the interior of the car and we're getting ready to redo it again right now.

29:59I got a stack of parts in the garage, six feet high. So we're getting ready to redo the interior completely. Uh, me and a buddy of mine from my church, we're going to do it together. So, so that's all in-house. Um, the engine, I went to specialists at McGonigal engine. Uh, they, they supplied my racing engines for years in stock cars. And so I went to McGonigal engines in a Muncie, Indiana and got just an amazing motor for it. Um, uh, you know, cold case, aluminum radiators. Uh, I, I did not want to try to reinvent the wheel and radiators.

30:29Trying to take a Fox body and keep that big monster V8 cool is not easy. Cold case took care of it. And I had, I had my mechanic put it in. I didn't even do it myself. So most of the stuff past the interior, um, a little bit of body work and change in spark plugs. I trust somebody smarter than me. What do you think about the community? Uh, this is such a unique environment that we stepped into when I first bought my first classic car. This is probably seven or eight years ago when I moved to California, bought a 65 Mustang convertible from a guy that had been keeping it in a storage locker for basically a half a

31:03dozen or so years, never really drove it as much as he wanted. And he said, I want to sell this to you. I want you to drive it. And so we, I've had an opportunity to get out probably not as often as I do. I have a, a whole stable of, of old Ford trucks. And of course the Mustang as well, the Mustang is the one I keep under the cover and the Ford trucks. I'm like, they like living outside in the wild. Um, what do you think about this community of, of just car enthusiasts? They are the most loyal, generous, supportive group of folks that I have ever met until about

31:35seven, eight years ago when I, uh, when I bought my, my car. So what do you feel about the community? I think that the classic car community, and, and, and I'm going to mention specifically how it relates to first generation Mustang enthusiasts. So that's the specific relationship and context that I'm talking about. I think that a lot of classic car enthusiasts have grown up to the point, uh, to where they're no longer 25 years old and they've been around for a little while and they have lost a lot

32:07of their brand identity. And now as a car collector guy, uh, you can have a Corvette fan go out and he'll enjoy the Mustang Corral and he'll just think it's fantastic. And you can have a Chevelle guy and he'll be over in the Mopar section. And I think there's a lot of cross pollination that when we were all much younger, you know, we had our Ford hats on and we would go to the races and wad up the empty beer cans and throw them at the Chevy guys.

32:38I think a lot of that's gone. I do, Doug. I think now you've got a lot more networking and a lot more cross pollination and appreciation of other kinds of cars. And that's been good for the first gen Mustang community. Yeah, I agree with you. And I think we've all calmed down a little bit and we're not necessarily out in the high school parking lot doing donuts, but we are actually enjoying a nice adult beverage with, uh, with our, with our competition, uh, brands that are out there, whether at Mopar or, or, uh, or a Chevy or Ford all hanging out together.

33:08Well, I learned a long time ago. I'm not on Ford's Christmas list. They do not send me a present in December. They don't know who I am. They don't care who I am. It's just another mega corporation. They just happened to have made my favorite car. Agreed. Agreed. Uh, Steven, where do we send people that want to get more information about you or anything that you want to promote? Now's your, now's your time. Where do we, where do we send people? Well, uh, first of all, a big shout out and a big thank you to a stable brand fuel stabilizer and three Oh three car care products.

33:39I wouldn't use anything else. Some of those guys are not just business partners. They're, they're very good friends and I really appreciate them. Uh, mechanical engine and, uh, uh, out of Muncie, Indiana, they've just been wonderful to me and their, their motors are absolutely top shelf and they're, they specialize in racing motors, but they will take care of your classic car. Uh, and, um, so far as where to find me, uh, Facebook and Instagram, just look up Steven Cox. And if it comes up with more than one, if you put in Steven Cox racing driver, I, I, the

34:09only one that comes up, uh, you can also follow blue thunder on both of those platforms. And, uh, you can go to Sop with motorsports.com S O P W I T H Sop with motorsports.com and keep track of all my, uh, racing, all my media work. It's all right there. That's great. That's great. And we'll make sure we put links in the show notes for all of those as well. So anybody that wants to get in touch with you or find out a little bit more about what you do and how you do it, we'll be right there in the, uh, in the notes, Steven, thank

Conclusion

34:37you so much for sharing. I appreciate you staying a little extra. I know I told you we go about 20 minutes and I think we're over 30 minutes at this point. Great conversation. Thanks for sharing your wisdom. This has been a barrel of fun. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm looking forward to your next broadcast. I'll be there. I'll be listening. Thank you. Nice. Hey, classic Ford Mustang community, keep it safe, keep it rolling and keep it on the road until next time. Thanks for listening to the Ford Mustang first generation, the early years podcast, please subscribe rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts ideas for the show.

35:09Click the link in the show notes. Thanks again for tuning in.