NASCAR<\/a> Cook Out Clash weekend. The 16-year-old will be compete in the Madhouse Classic 100 Sportsman\u2019s race, set for 2:45 p.m. on Jan. 31.<\/p>\nThe NASCAR Cup series non-championship\u00a0exhibition race is held before the Daytona 500 season opener.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s gonna be a cool experience for everyone in Lindsay, I guess, to see the hometown boy go race in the States,\u201d said Ollie, a pro late-model driver.<\/p>\n
Ollie has raced at the track in Salem-Winston before, but not on this big of a stage amid massive crowds and a nationally televised audience.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt\u2019s going to be televised to millions of people, and I\u2019m just super excited to be racing at the same time as the NASCAR Cup Series,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing in the same garage with them and chatting with them at the same time, and getting tips from real Cup drivers. That\u2019s going to be super cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
He may have earned his driver\u2019s licence just a month ago, but Ollie has been racing since he was nine years old.<\/p>\n
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But before he was battling other drivers, he faced a bigger battle with myelodysplasia (MDS), a rare and life-threatening bone marrow cancer.<\/p>\n
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Diagnosed at age four, he required a bone marrow transplant at Cincinnati Children\u2019s Hospital, with his sister Scarlette serving as his donor.<\/p>\n
That was followed by two years of recovery and fighting through complications.<\/p>\n
His father Rob introduced his then nine-year-old son to junior late-model cars, which quickly became a passion.<\/p>\n
Ollie went on to win races at the junior level, moving onto full-size stock-cars at age 13 and racing against adults in the Ontario Sportsman Series. Two years ago, Ollie earned the OSS\u2019s\u00a0 \u201cMost Promising New Talent\u201d award and the \u201cHard Charger\u201d title for passing the most cars.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a pretty proud dad,\u201d said Ferguson. \u201cHe has come a long way in his life. He\u2019s fought a lot of battles \u2014 both on the track and off.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Ferguson says Ollie\u00a0 competing at Bowman Gray will be a \u2018surreal\u2019 moment for their family.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes I just can\u2019t even believe that we went from a little four-year-old kid racing his NASCARs on a couch who was too sick to be able to go outside,\u201d recalled Ferguson. \u201cAnd now he\u2019s strapping into a sportsman at Bowman Gray Stadium in the madhouse classic.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of surreal, actually. To be honest, I still can\u2019t believe we\u2019re doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last week, Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes Brock MP Jamie Schmale presented a certificate of well-wishes to Ollie, acknowledging the youth\u2019s fighting spirit.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s pretty important to celebrate and recognize the accomplishments of this young individual achieving so much so early in life,\u201d said Schmale. \u201cAnd to reach that scale, to be participating at a track that\u2019s got so much history representing not only our community, but also our country, making us proud.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oillie says he\u2019s thrilled to be one of a few Canadians to race at Bowman Gray next month, competing against older, more experienced drivers \u2014 all on a track he says leaves little room for error.<\/p>\n
\u201cBowman Gray is just its own animal; like it\u2019s a completely flat track, no banking, and it has pretty much no grip,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
And he\u2019ll have plenty of supporters and local sponsors cheering him on.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWhen I walk through a crowd of people at the racetrack, they know who I am,\u201d said Ollie. \u201cAnd there\u2019s little kids who run up to you and ask for your autograph or a hero card or a T-shirt or anything. And it\u2019s just like, \u2018this is super cool.\u2019 Like you\u2019re their superhero.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like how I used to think of, like, Kyle Busch as my superhero.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\t© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A teenage racer from Lindsay, Ont., is about to compete on one of the biggest stages in American…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,176201,82,10223],"class_list":["post-463540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nascar","tag-ollie-ferguson","tag-sports","tag-stock-car-racing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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