RELATED: Team transporter catches fire coming home from Kentucky 

 

DOVER, Del. — It might be the oldest transporter in the garage. Hard to say, but if there’s one older …

Up front in the lounge area there are mirrors on the ceiling. The cabinet includes a stereo system that features a side-by-side cassette tape deck. The lone photo on the wall is an artist’s rendering of the No. 52 entry. The car in the picture is sporting sponsorship from Alka-Seltzer.

Maybe it’s the oldest hauler, maybe not. But the white trailer used to move the Jimmy Means Racing entry from its shop in North Carolina to Dover International Speedway this weekend served its purpose. Called back into active duty after a fire destroyed the team’s primary hauler, it’s a throwback of sorts to an earlier era.

“Watch your head when you go up there,” team owner Jimmy Means advised. “This one’s old school.”

Driver Joey Gase finished 21st in last Saturday’s NASCAR XFINITY Series race and Means was headed back to North Carolina when a wheel bearing overheated and caught a tire on fire. The fire quickly spread into the hauler.

RELATED: Dover race results

“We had just stopped 30 miles up the road,” Means said Saturday, “fueled up and I personally went around and laid my hand on all the hubs and they were normal.”

In the days after the incident, other teams reached out and offered assistance. Some offered to loan trailers. One Sprint Cup team owner told his group to give Means whatever he needed to make sure he made it to the next race.

Friends and fans raised more than $10,000.

Fortunately, help from the No. 22 Team Penske team, which stopped to help, lessened the damage done by the fire.

“If it hadn’t been for them … we used up all the fire extinguishers, 42 bottles of water, coke soda, orange soda, ice by the handful,” Means said. “We actually thought we had it out and it (flared) up again and we were all out of supplies. Watched it burn for about 15 or 20 minutes until the fire department got there.

“At least they helped us keep it from burning the cars up. If they hadn’t have stopped it would have burned the cars up for sure.”

Other than damage to the hauler itself, and the pit box used on pit road, most of the damage to the contents was smoke and water related. The cars, while looking the worse for wear, were salvageable. The trailer and pit box were not. Gase competed in Saturday’s Hisense 200 at Dover in the same car he raced at Kentucky.

“The cars, I’m amazed they weren’t hurt,” Means said. “They needed to be completely taken apart, everything painted and all that. They did get warm and from the water on them naturally they all rusted. Plastic strips to keep the heat and the air in (at the rear of the transporter) melted, all that went up in the air and just settled on everything. It was just a big mess.

“It really didn’t hurt the equipment that much other than just being filthy and water damage to some of it. We were fortunate that our radios were in the front … did get a little water damage but didn’t get any intense heat.”

Prepping the back-up hauler, built in 1990, was a task in itself. It had been sitting idle for several years — Means said he hadn’t kept the license plates up to date and had to rush to the courthouse to pay three years’ worth of taxes to get it back on the road.

Volunteers joined in to help the team prepare for this week’s race.

“Definitely a thrash to get it done,” he said. “Actually, by the last day it came out better than we thought it was going to be. We were prepared to be here Friday morning; we loaded Wednesday night at 9:30. Thought that was a pretty good job.

“Probably the average age of the crew helping us was 65. Anywhere from 78, 74, 65, 68 working on this stuff, getting it clean. Crew chief (Tim Brown) did a whale of a job of getting everything cleaned up and hopefully putting on the truck what we needed to get through this weekend. That will give us a little more time to get this thing stocked so we can operate out of it the rest of the year.”

Gase called it “kind of the worst time possible for us for this to happen,” but said after going through the car “as best we could,” nothing seemed beyond repair.

“We had a lot of guys come in, worked a lot of hours, even my girlfriend came in and helped get everything cleaned up,” he said. “That was the hardest thing. But it was a group effort and I think we did pretty good to get it back and get it here.”

Gase’s Donate Life Chevrolet started 28th Saturday as the field was set per the rulebook when qualifying was canceled. After a flat left rear early in the race, he finished 24th.

It wasn’t a win, but given all that the team had to overcome just to get to Dover, it was impressive just the same.