SPEEDWAY, Ind. — At one point in late July/early August, question marks surrounded Justin Grant’s availability to race again in 2025, let alone continue onward without missing a beat on the way to his second USAC Silver Crown National Championship.
On July 27, Grant suffered a broken left foot in a crash during a USAC AMSOIL National Sprint Car feature at Indiana’s Lawrenceburg Speedway.
At the time, Grant held the USAC Silver Crown point lead and had nearly a third of the series schedule remaining on the docket.
With three screws installed in his foot, five broken metatarsals and torn ligaments, things seemed bleak as he lay in a hospital bed fitted with a hard cast, pondering his next move with encouragement from his wife, Ashley, daughter of National Sprint Car Hall of Famer Bubby Jones.
“I broke my foot pretty good there, and I thought it was going to be a bit of a major deal,” Grant recalled. “But my wife, immediately said (to the doctors), ‘Hey, you guys have got to figure something out because he’s got to keep racing. I was thinking, “erm, my foot hurts pretty bad. I don’t know about that.’
It wasn’t too long before pondering turned into action.
“By the next morning, I was on the phone with (crew chief) Dennis (LaCava) and we were devising how to get me back in the car and how to make the brakes work,” Grant explained. “Emotionally, I felt so bad, but I didn’t have any extra bandwidth to worry about how I felt emotionally. It was all I could do to get to the race track, get into a race car and run 100 laps.”
With only 13 days between the crash and the next Silver Crown race, LaCava went to work, constructing a piece metal that resembled a dolly at first inspection. The piece clamped around Grant’s cast and featured a plate on the bottom that could meet up to the pedal.
The overarching goal was to alleviate the load off the front half of his foot, thus allowing him to use his ankle and shin to apply the brakes.
At first, the goals were fairly meager heading into the Silver Crown round at the .555-mile paved, high banked oval of Indiana’s Salem Speedway on August 9. Through the grapevine, it was suggested that Grant was merely going to show up, run a few laps around the bottom and collect his start points/money.
Yet, as the race wore on, Grant’s goals had evolved. In the end, if you had been living under a rock, then watched Grant at Salem, you’d have had no idea of the predicament he was in, outside of him using crutches to “walk” anywhere he needed to go.
“At the beginning, that was all I focused on,” Grant recalled. “’If I can start the race, it’s better than not going. If I can make it to halfway, that’s better than 25. If I can make it to 100, that’s better than 50. I went down there and ran second to Kody (Swanson), and said, ‘Well, I guess this foot’s going to be all right. We’re going to stay in this thing.’”
Following Salem, Grant reeled off consecutive fourth-place finishes on the dirt miles at the Illinois State Fairgrounds and the Du Quoin State Fairgrounds, followed by another fourth in the season finale at Ohio’s Eldora’s Speedway.
Coupled by the fact the team had zero DNFs in 2025, 13 top 10s in 13 starts, along with a strong first two-thirds of the season that saw nary a finish worse than seventh all season long, Grant also won back-to-back on the pavement and dirt at Ohio’s Toledo Speedway and Kansas’ Belleville High Banks in April and May, respectively.
Grant’s final tally in the standings was 56 points ahead of C.J. Leary and marked the second USAC Silver Crown driving title for himself, the entrant title for Ron Hemelgarn of Hemelgarn Racing, as well as fellow team members, spotter Brian Karraker, crewman Jason Reynolds and Nick Bohanon, owner of the engine on the dirt car. It was also another feather in the cap for LaCava, who quite literally, saved the day and the season for Grant.
“I owe a lot of thanks to Dennis LaCava,” Grant praised. “He prepares great race cars and we didn’t fall out of anything all year long. That’s huge with a short schedule like this. Not only did we not fall out, but we also had a fast racecar every weekend. He’s the one who manufactured everything to keep my foot going. Without his efforts, attention to detail and ingenuity, we wouldn’t be here.”
LaCava is a former midget racer himself, and during the 1990s and 2000s, was crucial to Hemelgarn Racing’s success with Buddy Lazier as the winner of the 1996 Indianapolis 500 and the 2000 Indy Racing League championship.
