NASCAR Truck Series team overcomes major shop fire to race at Iowa

The fire was devastating, destroying nearly 40 percent of ThorSport Racing’s 100,000-square-foot shop in Sandusky, Ohio, early Monday morning. Lost in the conflagration were the rooms where the two-time NASCAR Truck Series championship team built its chassis and hung bodies on its fleet of Toyotas for drivers Matt Crafton, Rico Abreu, Ben Rhodes and Cameron Hayley.

Eighteen fire crews were required to extinguish the inferno, the last not leaving the facility until 16 hours after the initial call. No one was injured. The exact cause of the fire is under investigation by the Ohio State Fire Marshall’s office, though it is believed to have originated in the backside of the building, according to ThorSport general manager David Pepper.

The Sandusky community immediately rallied around the team, with local businesses providing lunches and residents offering assistance in myriad ways. Even as the shop burned, firefighters were able to save 12 trucks by pushing them to awaiting team employees, who moved the Toyotas out of harm’s way.

And despite being on-track adversaries, numerous teams across NASCAR have reached out. Within 24 hours of the fire, Pepper said he received over 400 text messages and emails from other organizations including Kyle Busch Motorsports and Red Horse Racing, which each field championship-contending truck teams.

“You cannot say, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you enough’ to your competitors,” Pepper said. “We’ve got a handful of teams that brought us transmissions and gears so we can go to Gateway (Motorsports Park) next week [and race]. We had a lot of the stuff in the trucks for this week, but most of our Gateway stuff was in the building and lost in the suspension shop.”

Pepper vows ThorSport’s four full-time trucks will continue -- all are present for this weekend’s race at Iowa Speedway. He said the team will do everything within its power to limit the performance impact. Crafton, a two-time winner in 2016 and currently leading the standings, is a virtual lock to qualify for Truck Series Chase playoffs.

“The answer is no, it won’t affect anything whether we’re building them in parking lots, whether we’re staying at race tracks and asking them to let us stay late and build them,” Pepper said. “We have to build race trucks that keep the points lead, put all our trucks in the Chase and win a championship. The goals haven’t changed. They just can’t. There cannot be a built in excuse for this. This is when we have to show our leadership and lead this team to where it needs to be and that’s out front as one of the premier teams that we feel we are.”

Although it lost much, including three constructed trucks, and the shop is completely unusable due to fire, smoke or water damage, the predicament has galvanized ThorSport. By Tuesday morning, the team had taken over the parking lot of an abandoned grocery store across the street from the charred building.

Further inspiration came from a delivery made by an older woman who lives in the Sandusky area. She brought cookies to crewmembers as they worked in the Kroger parking lot under the hot sun. She had a simple question for the team: Would ThorSport make it to Iowa so she could watch them Saturday night?

“That energized the guys,” Pepper said. “They heard her say that and it was like, ‘Heck, yeah. We’ll be in Iowa for you. We’ll be there racing. Don’t worry.’ It’s been overwhelming, it really has. The entire community, just everybody.”