Yes, last Saturday Mike Loney won his first sportsman feature at Grandview Speedway. Yes, he did so in a 2014 Hig Fab chassis, against 47 other entries that ran mostly newer cars and ones from Bicknell. But the win also marked a significant milestone — it came after beating colon cancer.
Loney kept his three-year-long battle against cancer quiet while he raced.
“I didn’t tell anyone simply because I didn’t want to be asked every day, ‘How are you feeling?’ or ‘How are you doing?’ Loney, of Taylor, Pennsylvania, said.
Away from the track, Loney received plenty of motivation to keep racing.
“I was living day by day,” said Loney. “The doctors urged me to continue to do what I was doing, racing. It sucked going through it all. I never missed an appointment. My body responded well to everything. Thank God, right now I am cancer free. I learned to love life, and I love racing.”
Loney’s track record consists of three sportsman championships, five street stock championships, and 67 feature wins. He didn’t think he needed a colonoscopy, but the results of the test said otherwise.
“No one in my life ever had cancer — I’m the only one,” Loney said. “When doctors recommended a colonoscopy at age 50, like a lot of guys I said, ‘No thanks, I’m good!’”
His wife, Dawn, also kept him going.
“She was with me at every hospital appointment, and she is by my side at every race,” Loney said. “We have no big sponsors and no money behind us. I never drove for anyone else.”
Loney typically goes to the races with just Dawn and his crew member he met in a bowling league 38 years ago, Jimmy Winters. He usually competes at Penn Can Speedway, Big Diamond Speedway, and Orange County Fair Speedway. Loney has raced Grandview just six times, four of them being this season and the other two times last year.
Mike Loney readily expresses his gratitude, including for the help he received at Grandview from Bobby Trapper Sr. and Jr., as well as Alex Yankowski.
“Racing is all about meeting people and making friends,” said Loney. “You meet people that become your friends for life, even though you only see them once a week for half the year.”
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
