One second after the Mustang's engine shut down, the garage filled with flames.
Ed’s car was idling in his buddy’s garage, with only the trunk poking out into the driveway, when the engine started spraying a fine mist of fuel.
Outside in the cool spring air, Ed was on the phone with a tuner who was remotely adjusting the computer on the high-performance engine.
His buddy, in the driver's seat, saw a cloud of mist streaming out from under the hood. He didn’t know an injector O-ring had failed, but he knew something was wrong.
He shut it down.
A second later, the cloud of fuel touched the hot exhaust and ignited.
A fireball lit up the garage, reaching all the way to the ceiling.
Flames spread across the floor, followed by tongues of fire at least eight feet high.
Ed dropped his phone and raced toward the flames. In that moment, he had to make an agonizing choice:
Save the car he'd spent years building, or save his friend's house?
Until that moment, it had been just another afternoon in the garage. Ed lives in northwest Indiana, and the way he tells it, cold weather is garage season.
"I always tell people, if your car ain't broke, leave it alone and enjoy the summertime. Work on it in the winter," Ed said. "There's a group of us that hang out and build cars. One of us is always doing something to our cars in the winter. So we like to spend time in each other's garages each weekend, you know? That's our little thing."
He's been a car guy his whole life, just like his dad. He'll put thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars into a car just because he loves the process.
"I build them and then find an excuse to do something new," he said. "I just like working on them."
Two months before the fire, Ed had bought an H3R Performance extinguisher with a quick-release mount for the Mustang's roll cage.
"It's something that you should have just in case. It's the first time I ever needed one, but I'm glad it was there," Ed said. "Without it, it would have been a total loss, I know that."
With flames towering up from the engine bay, there was no time to debate or wait to see what would happen next. Ed made a split-second decision.
"There was a fire in the garage, and I was more worried about burning his house down than I was about my car," he said.
He started pushing the flaming car back away from the garage.
At the same time, his buddy pulled the extinguisher from the roll cage and used it to put out the garage fire.
The clean-agent extinguisher worked quickly. But spraying the garage meant there wasn't enough left to fully extinguish the engine-bay fire.
Luckily, someone driving by saw the fire and brought over another extinguisher to help them finish putting the fire out.
It did the job. But because it was a standard dry chemical extinguisher, it left powder all over the Mustang's engine bay, creating exactly the kind of mess and rust concern that car builders hate.
The cleanup was no small task. But once the engine was out, Ed did what builders do: he made the car better.
"Once I got the motor out and all cleaned up, it gave me an excuse to do more to the car. I put in a TKX Tremec and did some new stuff to the motor. I tell people, my car is always 99 percent built," Ed said with a laugh. "It's never 100 percent."
He posted the video of the fire on Instagram, and the response was overwhelming.
"Every single person I know went out and bought extinguishers after that," Ed said. "Because if you have a fire and you can't put it out, you're going to lose everything you have."
Looking back, the fire taught Ed two lessons he will never forget.
First, an extinguisher may have more than one job to do, so it's wise to carry two.
Second, once the flames are out, the difference between clean agent and powder becomes very real.
"I would definitely recommend the clean agent to anybody," he said. "Once the powder gets on stuff, it instantly rusts anything that’s metal. The clean agent didn’t do that."
It took about eight months to get the Mustang back on the road.
H3R Performance replaced the extinguisher Ed used in the fire. He also bought another one.
"I'm actually going to keep two of them in the car now," Ed said.
The first extinguisher is mounted behind him on the roll cage. The second goes under the seat, where he can reach it fast.
"Seconds matter, right?" he said. "In a fire, every second matters."
"You've got a car that's got tens of thousands of dollars of work and thousands of hours in it, and you're going to put a cheap fire extinguisher in it? That doesn't make sense. Spend the money on a good fire extinguisher that will actually save your car."
— Ed Madonia
Protect the Car You’ve Built
H3R Performance extinguishers are built with durable all-metal construction and secure mounting options for garage, street, track, off-road, and daily driver use.
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