The Snowball Derby has a reputation for humbling even the biggest names in racing. Talent, money, and hype don’t mean much when half the field is sliding into each other before lap fifty. The 2010 chaos at Five Flags Speedway was a perfect example.

Out of 37, only twelve saw the checkered flag, and just eight finished on the lead lap. The entry list read like a who’s who of short-track hotshots and future NASCAR stars: a fifteen-year-old Chase Elliott leading laps, Landon Cassill running up front, and plenty of other seasoned veterans with deep pockets and deeper résumés.

When the smoke cleared, the driver holding the trophy was an eighteen-year-old local girl named Johanna Long, who nobody outside Pensacola had expected to win. Let’s relive that epic race through her lens.

Johanna Long looks back at her emotional win

Johanna Long still laughs when she tells the story, because the whole race felt like a demolition derby with a trophy at the end.

“We go green and then they wreck in front of me,” she remembered.

“We start again and they wreck in front of me again. I’m like, oh goodness.”

Sixteen cautions in three hundred laps will do that to you. Every restart was a coin flip. You had to stay clean, move forward, and just pray that the guy beside you doesn’t turn left too early.

Late in the going, she finally caught Landon Cassill. Long had fresh tires from a perfectly timed stop. Cassill was hanging on with rubber that had seen better days.

“When I got to Landon, I got to the gas just a little too early, and he was really free,” she said. “I got into it.”

Cassill looped it on the back straight, a pileup erupted behind them, and for one terrifying moment, Long thought her dream was toast.

She got on the radio in full panic mode: “Oh they’re going to put me to the back. They don’t want to see me win. They’re just going to kill me. I didn’t mean to do that.”

Her spotter talked her down fast. It was hard racing, nothing dirty, and the officials let her keep the position.

From there, she never looked back. She passed Donnie Wilson clean on the inside for the lead on lap 315 and held him off over the final thirteen laps like she had been winning Derbys her whole life.

When she was asked how she remembered the last lap, Long tried her best to hold her tears, but couldn’t. Her voice shriveled as she spoke.

“Just excitement. I was excited to see my dad. Just because they tried so long and so hard to win it, so it was cool to win it for them.”

An emotional moment that saw her remember her father, Donald Long, an ex-Late Model Stock car driver, who got Johanna Long into racing and started training her from the tender age of five.

Chase Elliott had led sixty-one laps earlier in the day and looked like the car to beat until the chaos caught him too. Plenty of other heavy hitters went home on hook. Long just kept her nose clean, hit her marks when the tires were right, and drove away from the best short-track field anybody could remember.

An eighteen-year-old kid from Pensacola, running a family-owned car against million-dollar teams, took the biggest Super Late Model win on the planet. Sometimes, surviving really is the fastest way around.

Fast forward to right now, and the Snowball Derby is getting ready for another kid with a famous last name to try the same thing.

Fifteen years later, another teen rises

Thirteen-year-old Keelan Harvick, Kevin’s son, is rolling into Five Flags with the sharp No. 62 Rackley WAR Chevy. He’s already been racing full-bodied stock cars for a full season, picking up late-model wins on both coasts and turning heads in the CARS Tour with speed that doesn’t match his birth certificate.

He’ll run the Snowflake 125 Pro Late Model race first, where he’s been one of the quickest qualifiers anywhere he shows up this year. If he locks into the big Derby on Sunday, he has a real chance to do something nobody has done since Chase Elliott in 2011: win the Snowball as a teenager.

Elliott was sixteen years and a few days when he pulled it off and instantly stamped himself as the next big thing. Keelan doesn’t turn fourteen until February. That means the youngest-winner record is absolutely on the table.

The car will be perfect; Rackley WAR knows how to build Derby winners. But it’s Keelan’s right foot that has people talking. He’s already shown he can wheel a late model with the best of them, putting cars in victory lane and grabbing poles like it’s no big deal.

Just like Johanna Long fifteen years ago, he’ll roll in as the young underdog with the famous dad. Just like Long, all he has to do is keep the fenders on it when the wrecks start flying, put the car in the right spot late, and let the chaos take care of the rest.

We are witnessing two stories, fifteen years apart, on the same legendary half-mile in Pensacola. One eighteen-year-old girl shocked the short-track world and proved the Derby doesn’t care how old you are or how much money is behind you.

Now, a thirteen-year-old kid is walking the same pit road with the same oversized dream. If the wrecks start piling up again this December and a teenager is the last one standing when the checkered flag drops, nobody should be surprised. The Snowball Derby has done it before, and it might just be ready to do it again.