May the tears I cried in 2020-21 water the seeds I plant in 2022.

That optimistic outlook is part of what Quain Stott is relying on to get him over the stress, loss and illness he’s endured over much of the last three years. 

In April of ’21, the former Pro Modified champion and Southeast Gassers Association owner lost his partner of 36 years, Cynthia Phillips. In September, a case of COVID pneumonia nearly killed the 61-year-old Stott – and at the time, he would have considered death a blessing, given how lonely he was for Phillips. 

“I’m glad the last three years are over,” Stott said Wednesday from his Stott Speed Shop office in Columbus, N.C.

Stott had dealt with the loss of a girlfriend before. Nearly 40 years ago, then-girlfriend Colleen Brannon was killed in a car crash. This time, with Phillips, Stott watched her gradually fade as the effects of breast cancer ravaged her body.

“I was kinda prepared for what happened this time,” he said. “Colleen’s death was a shock – my dad called and told me – but watching somebody die for a year and a half is worse. To watch her drift away was just horrible.

“But, I’m carrying on, I’m enjoying life, and things couldn’t be any better right now. My life is really, really in order,” he added. “I still have my crying spells when certain songs come on the radio or certain things are said, but it’s more happy tears now. … Everything good that’s happened in the nine months since Cynthia passed, I firmly believe she sent it my way. I’ve had a lot of good luck lately, and I tell everybody she’s watching over me. She wouldn’t want me sitting around pouting and being lonely. I used to say that Colleen sent Cynthia to me, and now Cynthia has sent me somebody new.”

Photos of Phillips dominate Stott’s personal Facebook page, and even more are present wherever he turns in his office. It was only a month ago that he finally removed her clothes from the closet of the home they shared on 138 acres of Polk County in southwestern North Carolina.

They met after Brannon’s death when Stott was 25 and building race cars for a living and Phillips was a 17-year-old high school student in Landrum, S.C., the daughter of textile-mill workers. Stott was smitten as soon as he spied Phillips getting gas in her father’s truck at a convenience store. He asked around to find out who she was – and when she met him, she wasn’t interested.

“I asked her, ‘You want to go out sometime?’ She said, ‘I’ve got a boyfriend.’ I said, ‘Well, we won’t invite him,’ ” Stott said. “She laughed and drove off. I ran into her three or four times and tried to talk to her for several months. Then she broke up with him, and we started going out.”

They made for an odd couple, starting with their age difference. She didn’t like going to movies, like Stott did. She didn’t have an affinity for his favored country music. He said they had nothing in common, and she wasn’t the least bit impressed with his accomplishments on the dragstrip.

Yet, in short order, they embarked on what Stott calls “the world’s greatest love affair.” 

It’s rare, he said, to find photos without both of them in the frame, and photos on Facebook that he’s never before seen. She became intensely interested in his passion, drag racing, and helped him build and repair his cars. For the better part of three decades, it was Phillips who almost always buckled him into the driver’s seat, pulled the straps tight on his helmet, and latched the protective window net. It was Phillips who would back him up from the burnout process, then align him properly in the best part of the racing groove before each pass down the eighth- or quarter-mile. Stott said she “might have missed two or three races” in all that time.

And it was Phillips who kept Stott from quitting racing in 1995 when he ran out of funds to continue pursuing the IHRA Pro Modified crown. He was on the verge of quitting after he failed to qualify for a race at Morocco, Ind., and he told a promoter he couldn’t afford to come to an unsanctioned event en route to the next IHRA stop in Scribner, Neb.

When he got back to his race car, he found Phillips seated on the steps of their motorhome and in tears.

“She said, ‘I don’t want you to quit,’ ” Stott recalled. “We’d been dating about 10 years, and she’d been working and saving her money. I had tried to keep up the household bills and let her save her money, and I was about $3,000 behind on my end. She said, ‘I’ll loan you the $3,000.’ So I went back and told (the promoter) I’d be there, where we qualified and got paid, and we qualified at Scribner.

“A month or two later is when we got our first sponsor, Bug Eater. Had she not loaned me that money, we wouldn’t be doing this interview, and nothing that ever happened to me in racing since would’ve happened. I’d be working in a garage as a mechanic or something. I wouldn’t be where I am today without her moral support, but her financial support then. Everything I own – my property, my hot rod cars – and I think there are nine of them now – and I owe every single bit of it to racing, and to her.”

That includes the Southeastern Gassers Association, which is entering its 11th season this year. In 2018, Stott said he and Phillips realized they had invested more than $250,000 of their retirement funds into the series.

“Most women would’ve been raising hell if their man spent that kind of money,” Stott said, “but she never said a word, and she supported and went to every race ’til she just couldn’t any more.”

Phillips was an integral part of Stott’s racing for all of his eight IHRA Pro Mod national-event wins and a handful from ADRL competition … and his two IHRA Sportsman of the Year awards … and his Car Craft magazine all-star team selection … and his 2006 IHRA championship.

In 2015, Phillips finally tried her hand at racing with a ’56 Chevy known as “Flower Power” that raced in SEGA’s C/Gas division. She was a four-time event finalist, and twice wound up fourth in the season standings.

She was more popular as a “back-up girl” at SEGA events, a role that became a big part of the overall show as more women chose to participate.

They never married, though they discussed it “and probably should have.” They elected to not have children, partly because they agreed their racing lifestyle wouldn’t support it. Stott said Phillips once opined their relationship was “too good” – “a love affair like no other,” he called it – to add children to the mix.

“I think that was because we could spend time together and be happy,” Stott said. “A lot of guys want to get away from their wives every chance they get. I didn’t. I’d go play cards and have a guys’ night out, but I’d be missing her the whole time.

“I’m not saying we didn’t have our ups and downs, but one thing we never did was we never raised our voices at each other. We’d have our quarrels, and when she’d get mad she’d get her stuff and leave. A day or two later, I’d call – I was always on the wrong side of what we were quarreling about – and say, ‘You ready to patch this up?’ I wasn’t the best boyfriend in the world for probably the first 20 years, and one of the things that made me love her so much was that she put up with me anyway. As things got better about 2000, 2001, we really started having a good life.”

That was until November of 2019, when Stott thought Phillips was going to the doctor for a routine check-up.

But when he walked into the house that night, she said, “I’ve got to talk to you a minute,” and gave him the bad news: She had breast cancer, and the doctor estimated the disease had been present for at least a year.

Stott’s initial reaction was to note that breast cancer has a high cure rate – if caught early. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for Phillips.

“We had a good cry together, then decided we would fight it to the end, no matter. But it was too far gone; all over her body,” Stott said, who is now a vocal proponent for yearly mammogram testing for women. 

Chemotherapy and radiation helped extend her life, but eventually even the latter – and heavy doses of drugs meant to arrest her pain – were to no avail. The worst pain was in her right shoulder, and at one point, the pain was so bad that she asked to have her arm amputated. At that point, it was too late to take that course of action.

That’s when Stott said she told him, “Quain, I’m done, I can’t fight no more. I’m a burden on you, I’m a burden on my friends, and I’m a burden on myself. I’m gonna stop taking any treatments.”

She spent her final days getting all her financial affairs in order, giving away jewelry and clothing to specific friends and family. She arranged to have her niece, Alexis Phillips, now 21, to take the reins of the “Flower Power” gasser. Phillips planned her funeral, including having Stott’s younger brother, Mitch, serve as a makeshift pastor. She also gave a second commitment to Jesus Christ as her savior “to double-check and make sure” she would ascend to Heaven at her death.

Then she elected to stop eating, thinking it would take less than a handful of days to succumb.

“The fifth day, she looked up at me and said, ‘Quain, why is it taking so long?’ And I was like, ‘God, have mercy. Please take her,’ ” he said. “They couldn’t give her enough pain medicine to make her quit hurting.”

Finally, on April 19, 2021, two days after a SEGA race in Shelby, N.C., Cynthia Phillips died. Stott often referred to his diminutive partner as “my Barbie doll,” but she also evoked memories of the namesake character of the ’60s TV show “I Dream of Jeannie.” Phillips’ cremains are stored in an exact replica of “Jeannie’s” bottle.

The first week following Phillips’ death weren’t too difficult to handle. The next three or four months were tough, even as he followed her wishes and began to go out on dates. 

“We never had jealousy in our relationship. We used to tease about it. Like I told her, ‘If I go first, don’t fret over me one bit. Bring your boyfriend to the funeral and don’t be lonely.’ 

“I tried to figure out what I was trying to do? Was I trying to replace her? I was horribly lonely. We were together every day for 36 years. She was here in the shop every day – and then she wasn’t. I was so used to her being everywhere we went,” he said.

Just about the time Stott was starting to feel alive again, he nearly lost his life  to what he called “a supercharged dose” of COVID-19.

In early September, he had ridden his motorcycle on a cool, damp night. He awoke the next morning with a sore throat and runny nose, and those symptoms were gone the following day – and so was his sense of taste.

“Uh-oh, I know what this is,” he said he thought. “No big deal, I’ll be fine.”

But he grew weaker over the next three days, and friends talked him into getting a COVID test that turned out negative. Shortly thereafter, Stott’s niece visited, measured his blood-oxygen content and told him he needed to get to the hospital. He refused.

By the time his then-girlfriend arrived at his house, he was crawling across the floor and wanting to die.

“It felt like I was being buried alive or drowning – like trying to breathe through a straw. And at that point, I hadn’t eaten for four days. She called the ambulance, but I wouldn’t go. I told her, ‘No, I’m not going, I’m done, I’m ready to go see Cynthia, and this is an easy way to do it.’ I’m ready to go; there’s no fight left in me. But she took me in her car and the ambulance followed.

“They told me that if I hadn’t come in that day, I might not have died, but I wouldn’t have been in a position to recover, my immune system was so low.”

After a brief hospital stay, Stott was sent home to continue recovering, and no one except nurses were allowed in the house. Four-plus weeks later, and after missing a month of work at the shop, he said he still doesn’t feel like he’s 100%.

Even so, Quain Stott is ready to put the misery of recent years behind him. He’s anxious to see how a new dating relationship will fare over time, and there are 11 SEGA events to produce and oversee from March through November. He has no choice but to move forward, building on the foundation of all he and Cynthia put in place, and employing this as his impetus:

May the tears I cried in 2020-21 water the seeds I plant in 2022.