“Get Busy Living”: Health Scare Ignites Group’s Drag and Drive Adventures

As Michael Heston put it so succinctly, “most life-changing moments don’t come with warning lights.” Michael’s arrived on an ordinary Sunday drive home from his parents’ house in 2019, when his chest tightened, the world blurred, and his heart rate spiked past 250 beats per minute. He pulled into a closed volunteer fire station that happened to have a sheriff’s deputy parked outside. Minutes later he was in an ambulance. The diagnosis was “SVT,” but it wasn’t “the cool Ford kind of SVT,” he says. It was the kind that can kill you.

Doctors stabilized him and recommended an ablation. Michael describes it as being awake while they shock your heart and flood your system with synthetic adrenaline until it hits 300 bpm. Calling it “uncomfortable,” he admits, barely scratches the surface. But lying there afterward, the reality of the situation hit him. Nearing 50, raising three daughters, and spending more time in airports than at home as a global manager for an automotive supplier, he got precisely the clarity he needed: “get busy living or get busy dying.”

When he got out of the hospital, he did exactly that. He took his daughters on a long vacation. He told his friends they were going to SEMA whether they liked it or not, then added Bonneville Speed Week for good measure. He changed jobs. And he finally committed to building the drag-and-drive car he’d talked about for years.

The foundation was a clean 1965 Ford Fairlane he’d bought years earlier in Arizona, along with a pile of parts. After the hospital scare, someday became now. Friends jumped in, the group chat filled up, and before long the collective bunch had a permanent name: the BucketList Mob.

True to hot rodder form, Michael didn’t take the sensible route. As he says, “nothing I ever do is simple.” The Fairlane went together with a 331 cubic inch Ford small-block, mechanical fuel injection, an AOD, hidden radiators, and even an alternator hung off the rear axle. It was, by his own admission, a checklist of bad ideas for a drag-and-drive build. But he wasn’t after logic anyway.

After long nights, empty wallets, and a few fresh gray hairs, the car fired for the first time on the day they were supposed to leave for Hot Rod Drag Week 2019. On track, it was passable, but on the road, it was chaos. Parts shook loose, things overheated, and electrical gremlins appeared right on cue. They rolled into checkpoints at four and seven in the morning, hit the hotel at nine, slept for a couple of hours, then scrambled back to the track. On one pass they didn’t even swap to slicks, loosened three rocker arms, and lost a rocker nut in the header, only to find it two hours later.

The Fairlane guzzled E85, forcing a nearly 200-mile round trip just to find fuel. Charging problems and single-digit mpg sent them to Walmart in the middle of the night for batteries, a charger, and gas cans. When they finally made it to the hotel at 4 a.m., that somehow counted as early.

The time slips were ugly, with Hot Rod’s David Freiburger summing them up as “devastatingly slow.” They eventually realized they’d gotten a paper element fuel filter, which is a deal-breaker for mechanical injection. They’d been tuning around what they thought was a rich situation, but the engine was actually starving for fuel. On the first pass without the filter they picked up four seconds and were back in business.

By the end of the week, attrition magically worked in their favor as they rolled back home third in B/Gas. The trophy was great, but sharing it with his father, Roger, who was in his seventies and along for the ride, was the real win. The bond that formed made it one of the best weeks of Michael’s life.

In 2022 Michael ditched the small-block for a 545 cubic inch big-block Ford. He kept the mechanical injection “because that’s what makes the car.” He scored an unobtainium intake for a DRCE Oldsmobile on eBay and modified it for Trick Flow heads. Silver Fox built him a 950 HP-rated lockup AOD, and the very last bellhousing for AOD-to-BBF that JW Race Cars had left in stock. Four days before Drag Week 2023, the Fairlane couldn’t even idle.

Desperate, they hauled the engine five hours to Belmit Development in Pennsylvania and reworked nearly everything, new injectors, a smaller pump, revised mechanical setup—and the big-block cranked out 910 horsepower on E85. It “idled like a kitten,” he says.

The experiences of those years of being involved lit a fire in Roger, too. So they built him his own entry: a 1961 Ford F-100 gasser-style pickup known as the “Cluster Truck”, just like the truck he owned when Michael was a kid. They drilled a hole in anything that didn’t move to eliminate weight, dropped in a small-block Ford with a tunnel ram, AFR Renegade 205 heads, and even a quick-change rearend. Roger drove it everywhere, but what he hadn’t done—ever—was make a pass down a drag strip. Until Sick Week 2024.

That week became a Cinderella story, as the Fairlane ran strong, and the truck, towing a boat trailer, no less, became a fan favorite. Just say “the one towing the boat trailer,” and everyone knew exactly what you meant. Michael finished as Fastest B/Gas, and placed third in the Gassers/Hot Rods/Beetles class.

The truck ended up on the “I Survived Sick Week” shirt and later became the official track shirt for South Georgia Motorsports Park. For a man who always put family before fun, it was recognition that meant something.

Not every week ends clean. The gasser-themed Sick Smokies 2025 brought four cars in all (the Fairlane, F-100, a big-block Ford ’64 Comet, and a ’64 Falcon) from the Heston camp, and only one survived the grind. Says Heston of the week: “Of course, the only one that made it was the cursed-but-indestructible Cluster Truck, once again limping across the finish line with a half-functioning transmission, just like every other event it’s ever done.”

Michael is quick to credit the people around him—the BucketList Mob, who kept him from quitting and kept the cars moving forward. He’s also clear about the lesson that led to all of this: you don’t know how much time you have. Build the thing, take the trip, call your dad, start the bucket list. And don’t wait until it’s too late.