Photos Courtesy: NMRA Archives

It’s been a couple of years since we’ve seen Mark Anderson compete at an NMRA event, and when he last did, it was in the killed-off (and recently resurrected) Pure Street class. Anderson competed for a few years in “Ol’ Silver,” a car developed by his father Ron and sold off after Mark decided to take time off from racing to concentrate on work and family. 

But as we all know, when the racing bug bites, it bites hard, and as soon as Anderson found that the NMRA sealed crate-engine Coyote Stock class was going to be a reality, he started thinking about how to get back to the track, even going so far as to purchase an already-built Maverick chassis.

The realization set in that the Maverick was going to take too much work to get ready for the 2014 season, so Anderson went to chat with crew chief Brian Koestner about what kind of ideas he might have.

Koestner pointed in the corner of the Anderson Ford Motorsport shop where he works, at the car you see above, which is a former two-time-championship-winning machine while at the hands of Brian Meyer in the now-defunct Real Street class, and a deal was made to bring the car back to life.

Anderson explains, “I was always going to come back to the NMRA after I left, I just needed to find an affordable class that we could manage. I feel like the camaraderie, and smack talking for fun, it’s all back and it’s a breath of fresh air for all of us to start over. There’s so much to the driver and the car in this class, and I feel like there’s a whole lot of ET that can be picked up in those areas. If you win a race in this class, I think it’s going to feel real good as there are so many limiting factors to performance.”

The Maverick is still in the plans, but Anderson doesn’t expect that car to debut until the end of this season or the 2015 season as part of a two-car team with this car. With all of the interest in the NMRA’s Coyote Stock class this season, we’re expecting to see no less than 15 or 20 cars competing at many of the races. We’ll be in Florida for StangTV.com covering the event in just over a month and a half – so stay tuned!