Photo Credit: Noel Lanier
On Friday, David Pepper, General Manager of ThorSport Racing gave an update on the massive fire which happened on Sunday June 12 at around midnight. The team noticed there was a fire in the back of their shop somewhere between the basement and the second floor of their race shop while there late in the midst of setting up trucks for races ahead.
“Like I said, we’re 72 hours out,” Pepper stated. “We have a plan. We’re scattered across a couple of buildings in the community. The community really rallied behind us. Pegasus Trailer company (Pegasus Race Trailers) is letting us use about 40 percent of their shop. Another gentleman has offered up his race shop that’s down the street from there, so we’re putting some things in there – putting some surface plates in. We’ve got the water out of the building, temporary lighting back up, we’re already starting the rebuilding and renovation process to try to clean up what happened. Painting bodies at another location, so we’re kind of scattered all over Sandusky (Ohio) and a lot of people in the community have helped and the NASCAR community – just bringing us pieces and parts on multiple trailers here to get to this race – but we have a plan and we’re here. No one was hurt and we’re going to be racing.”
Pepper says the team plans to continue to compete in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series and all four of their trucks will be at every race.
“Clearly, we’re kind of going old school like this week – we’re out working in a parking lot getting the trucks ready for Iowa,” Pepper said. “We had people bringing us food – local establishments. Kind of went back to the late ‘90s of the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series when we used to work in parking lots at Sears stores, so for the old guard there at the race shop it was kind of a throwback and in some ways not that bad.
“Some of the young guys were pretty amazed that we used to build these things out in parking lots in between races out on the West Coast. We’re prepared. We would not be here racing without the first responders. We had fire departments from four different locations in the county there. They were literally pushing race trucks out. They’re big race fans. They know us. They’re putting a fire out and they’re in full fire gear asking us what trucks do they need to push out to us so we can be here at Iowa this week. They were in there pushing them to the door and then we’d take them the rest of the way. We would not be here racing without those guys.”
All of the trucks in the shop at the time of the fire suffered smoke or water damage – no group suffered more or less as they all suffered the same.
“We’re going to share trucks amongst the team like we always do,” Pepper added. “We had a couple brand new chassis that were back in that section of the race shop that probably suffered the most damage. They will probably be a loss. We’ll have to wait and see, but, you know, we’ll pull together as a team. At 4:30 in the afternoon on Monday afternoon, we were all pretty tired – everybody in the race team – trying to pull stuff out and we had it scattered all over the lawn on the side shop or on the south side of the shop and in some ways it was probably the best team building process we’ve ever had because you had guys just going in and getting pieces and parts and it didn’t matter what race car it was associated with – they were trying to salvage things.
“I’ve seen a group of guys right now pull together. It just makes me proud of them – proud of the organization we have — the crew chiefs, the car chiefs, the leadership we have. Duke and Rhonda (Thorson, team owners) have allowed us to put together and given us everything we need to build a great race team and it really shined through that afternoon on Monday when you saw everybody getting the equipment out. Obviously, we’re behind the eight ball a little bit. We need to come here and have a good, solid performance. That will do as much to keep the moral up as anything, but we did lose some equipment, but we’re in a good position to keep going.”
Pepper says the one thing he loves about being apart of the motorsports world is when tragedy strikes like it did at his race shop, everyone comes together as a family. He said within the first 24 hours after the fire he had received numerous texts as well as emails from other Truck Teams like Red Horse Racing, Kyle Busch Motorsports, GMS (Racing) just to name a few. Also, a few Sprint Cup Series teams had offered the use of their haulers as well as pit boxes.
“Across the entire spectrum of racing whether it be local short track guys at Sandusky (Ohio) that we know,” Pepper stated. “ARCA guys because we competed in ARCA for a number of years – offering up anything that we needed to get to these races. And the community in general. During the course of the day Wendy’s, Walmart, Jimmy Johns, the local restaurants that we eat at every day – they’re bringing food over just dropping it off for the guys and the first responders. You can not say thank you, thank you, thank you enough to your competitors. Our job is to come out here and beat all of these guys this week. We’ve got a handful of teams that brought us transmissions and gears so we can go to Gateway next week.
“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. The Mittler Bros. helping us out with saying if we need anything machine-wise. I can sit here all day and go through the list of pieces, parts, just tiny little things that people brought to us. The one that probably had the most affect though was not about the pieces and parts. An older lady at the Kroger parking lot – we’re over there working and she’s of no relation to any of the people on the team – comes up with a bunch of cookies and hands them to one of the guys and said she just needed to go out and get some cookies and wanted to know if we’re going to make it to Iowa so she could have something to watch this weekend.
“That energized the guys. They heard that – 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.”
Pepper doesn’t know when they will be able to move back into the race shop.
“Now we’re 72 hours out and the extent of the damage from all the pictures that folks are seeing was just trying to put the fire out,” Pepper quoted. “The fire was between the walls and ceiling, so it forced us to bring in an excavator and knock the walls down. We lost about 40 percent of the top side of the shop. The suspension department, our hard fab department, paint and body – they were either severely damaged or lost in the fire. The remaining part of the shop suffered a lot of water and smoke damage.
“But, until the inspectors get in there and really see where we are, it’s hard to set a timeline. We can make up timelines – we’d like to be in there in six weeks, 10 weeks – until we get all these folks that have to make sure the building is safe and we can move back in. The one thing I can promise you, Duke and Rhonda Thorson (owners) had a breakfast catered in for their team and Duke stood up in front of all of us and (expressed) his appreciation for all of us and what we had to do and told us, ‘Hey, you keep going, we go to the races, we go to win every week and we’re going to rebuild.
“We’re going to rebuild it better than it was before and we’ll be stronger for it.’ That’s kind of – we will be back in that building. I joked we had about 5,000 people a couple years ago in the community at the grand opening. I’m hoping we have about 5,000 at the grand-reopening. I just don’t know when that date is.”
Pepper says the fire in the shop will not effect the performance of the team this weekend at Iowa Speedway. He says they will build their trucks either in the parking lot or at the track if the track they are racing at that weekend will let them stay late to build them.
“We have to build race trucks that keep the points lead, put all our trucks in the Chase and win a championship,” Pepper added. “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.”
