The No. 44 Chevrolet Sprint Cup Series car, owned by Team XTREME and taken from a motel parking lot in Morrow on Friday, was found early Saturday in a wooded area near Loganville, according to a Twitter post by the team.
The car, which was to have been driven by Travis Kvapil in the Sprint Cup Series race Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway, was taken to the team’s shop in North Carolina on a rollback wrecker. The team’s truck, trailer, spare engine and pit equipment was not recovered, according to a report by the Associated Press.
Morrow police Detective Sgt. Larry Oglesby, who is in charge of investigating the disappearance of the car, also confirmed to the Associated Press that the car was recovered, and several race fans posted on Facebook that they’d seen the car on I-85 traveling north toward North Carolina.
“Old Faithful Home where it belongs,” Team XTREME posted on its Twitter account. The team, which was forced to withdraw at AMS because it did not have a backup car prepared, also indicated it plans to compete next weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
The disappearance of a race car is a rare occurrence in the sport, and this one appears to be a “perfect storm” of sorts.
If not for wintry weather in the Southeast earlier in the week, the No. 44 most likely would have been inside the team’s transporter as it traveled from the shop in North Carolina to the garage at AMS. But the team decided to send the transporter on ahead to ensure that it got in the garage on schedule and kept the car at the shop to continue race preparations.
The AMS race is the first with a new set of rules for tracks other than Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway, so the car the team fielded for Peachtree City’s Reed Sorenson in the Daytona 500 was not available to use at AMS, either as a primary car or a back-up.
The team did not participate in Thursday’s practice session at AMS, as crew chief Peter Sospenzo and other crew members worked late preparing the car.
They headed to AMS and stopped at a Morrow motel to spend the night before heading to AMS on Friday morning. But sometime before their departure, the truck and unmarked trailer with a race car inside, disappeared.
“I’ve been doing this since 1979,” Sospenzo told the AP. “I’ve probably been to 1,200 hotels and 1,200 race tracks. Never once has this happened. It’s crazy. But there’s a first for everything, I guess.”
