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Nobody wants to deal with the headache that comes with having your car stolen, but it’s hard to top the frustration former NASCAR driver Travis Kvapil undoubtedly felt when he was forced to withdraw from a race after someone jacked the vehicle he was planning on using.
There are plenty of things that can go wrong over the course of a NASCAR race, and the drivers and teams that compete in those showdowns put in a ton of work in the lead-up to each event in the hopes of minimizing the mistakes and pitfalls that have the potential to rear their ugly head.
The unofficially retired driver Travis Kvapil is very familiar with the ins and outs of the sport, as he started racing cars at Rockford Speedway in the early 1990s as soon as he was old enough to get his license and eventually made his way to the NASCAR circuit shortly after the turn of the millennium.
The Wisconsin native experienced a fair amount of success while competing in the Craftsman Truck Series (where he racked up nine career wins), and while it didn’t really translate to the stock cars he piloted while competing in the Cup Series, he still competed in 271 races over the course of his career—a number that would’ve been 272 if not for the strange incident that unfolded in 2015.
Travis Kvapil was forced to withdraw from a race because someone stole his car out of a hotel parking lot
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Kvapil headed down to Georgia at the end of February in 2015 to compete in the Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500, a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race that was held at Atlanta Motor Speedway on March 1st. Unfortunately, things took a very unexpected turn on the day he was set to participate in the qualifying session.
Kvapil and the rest of Team XTREME had booked rooms at a hotel near the racetrack and were using the parking lot to store the black Ford F-350 hauling the trailer containing the No. 44 car (which was valued at $250,000), a spare engine that cost $100,000, and various parts and equipment that totaled $17,000.
Based on surveillance footage that was captured outside the hotel, someone approached the truck at 5:30 A.M. on Friday and hopped inside before driving away with the trailer still attached. Police were quickly called to the scene, but they were unable to recover the car by the time the qualifying kicked off, which meant Kvapil and the team (a small operation that hadn’t brought a backup) were forced to withdraw.
The car was recovered on the side of a road in Gwinnett County early Saturday morning, The pickup truck was also recovered later that month, but the whereabouts of the trailer and the rest of its contents was still a mystery when police issued an arrest warrant for a man named Johnny Terry on April 9th.
Terry was eventually sentenced to 10 years probation and forced to pay a $1,000 fine after pleading no contest to the crime.
As far as I can tell, this remains the only time a NASCAR driver was unable to compete in a race because their car was stolen.