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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
CONCORD, N.C. — The next scheduled NASCAR race weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway is still a week and a half away, but on Wednesday afternoon, the 64-year-old racetrack was operating at full throttle. Helicopters and jets streaked overhead. The squealing of air brakes produced by massive tractor-trailers filled the parking lots. Engines rumbled to life as convoys of digger line and bucket trucks rolled out, having waited in the lots adjacent to the speedway for their assignments, and suddenly headed to all points west into the Appalachian Mountains.
That’s where so many towns, valleys and hollers remain filled with helpless people. They are still stranded in the wake of Hurricane Helene, even now, nearly a full week since she vanished into the atmosphere.
“The goal is to carry supplies up there, but really it’s about delivering hope,” said one NASCAR team pilot alongside a hangar at Concord Regional Airport, the stock car community’s de facto air base located just across I-85 from Charlotte Motor Speedway. That motorsports air wing has been in constant motion this week. A temporary lighted street sign at the entrance to the airfield blinked: OPERATION AIR DROP. VOLUNTEERS GO STRAIGHT TO TERMINAL.
The people in the cockpits ask for anonymity because “that’s not what this is about,” but the man speaking here on a perfectly sunny Wednesday afternoon has been making nonstop roundtrips into the mountains since Saturday, the first morning after Helene tore through Florida, Georgia, Upstate South Carolina and directly over the border that joins East Tennessee and Western North Carolina. He was one of many in the NASCAR community who became an impromptu air wing in 2010, delivering supplies to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
As multiple people were quick to remind on Wednesday, though, Helene felt worse. This wasn’t an island 1,200 miles away. This is a 40-minute helicopter flight. It’s home.
“Some of what we are doing is very specific, working with relief organizations to deliver supplies,” one pilot said, “but a lot of it has become as simple as seeing a family in an isolated house with no roads left to get out, waving and hoping we see them to get them out of there.”
The mirror that caught our attention well over a mile away 👀 only way we we were able to find someone stranded in the mountains at bottom of steep canyon. 6 attempts to land due to difficulty but we got there – got him a chainsaw, EpiPens, insulin, chicken food, formula, gas, 2… pic.twitter.com/Wdl4w7hMZM
— Greg Biffle (@gbiffle) October 3, 2024
On the ground at Charlotte Motor Speedway, as those choppers and planes rose into the skies above them, they opened Wednesday’s planned 12-hour shift for the pop-up drive-through donation drop-off site at 9 a.m., admittedly worried about a sluggish response. By lunchtime, though, nine NASCAR race teams or stock car equipment suppliers had already delivered truckloads of everything form bottled water and canned goods to medication, diapers, baby food and pet food. Most race shops in the Charlotte area had announced local collections and now they were bringing their first wave of donations to be packed up by the speedway. Following a steady line of Charlotte-area citizens who had bought whatever they could load into their cars, the racetrack had already packed a fifth-wheel trailer, a pair of 53-foot trailers and four Sprinter vans.
By 4 p.m., there were already 20-plus pallets each of water, diapers, wipes and food. So, Charlotte Motor Speedway officials announced they would do it all over again on Thursday.
Texted Speedway senior VP Scott Cooper, who was among the CMS employees who left the office to unload cars and trucks: “A couple with a 10-foot pull-behind trailer filled it up with donations and drove down from ATHENS, OH!!!”
The @NASCAR community is the BEST.
Thank you, @JTGRacing. ❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/cTtet8eMtO
— Charlotte Motor Speedway (@CLTMotorSpdwy) October 2, 2024
A convoy of trucks, some provided by those same NASCAR teams, will move it all to Charlotte’s sister track that sits on the edge of the North Carolina hills where the devastation begins. North Wilkesboro Speedway has been hosting its own collection efforts. There, emergency medical services and professional disaster relief organizations are waiting to distribute it all into the areas of need for as long as the need lasts. And it is expected to last for months, if not years. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Smoky Mountains, another sister track, Bristol Motor Speedway, is orchestrating similar efforts for similarly ravaged East Tennessee.
More than one of the pilots who have seen what Helene left behind commented that this feels different than other post-hurricane recoveries. Normally, after one week, there are already marked signs of improvement. But that is also typically in areas that are better fortified to handle tropical weather, like Daytona or Darlington. Mountain communities are constructed to survive snow, fires, and even small earthquakes; homes and towns built alongside rivers and creeks are not prepared to have those water flows turn into unstoppable tidal waves, birthed from a 100-year rainfall estimated to have dumped 40 trillion gallons of water onto the eastern seaboard.
“There is a helplessness to it that is hard to describe,” one team pilot texted after a return from the North Carolina-Tennessee border after a supply drop-off became the extraction of stranded seniors from a memory care center that has been without water, power or the ability to communicate since last week. “Imagine losing everything and then on top of that, after days of hoping, having to process the fact that that no one is coming because no one knows you are there. It puts the stuff we squabble over in perspective, doesn’t it?”
One would hope so. But then again, it seems that not even this millennium’s worst stateside natural disaster can compete with the force known as billable hours. Because while so many in the NASCAR community were pushing their way through a week of sleepless nights, wondering, “What more can we do?” others from within that same industry decided this was the perfect time to announce that they were suing the sanctioning body.
The move, from 23XI and Front Row Motorsports, has seemed inevitable ever since those two teams chose to hold out from signing off on last month’s charter agreement extension. There is tremendous debate and discussion to have over the antitrust lawsuit’s merit, the reasoning behind it, and the ultimate goal of it all. And there should be.
But the timing of their move, from the tipping off of the lawsuit on Tuesday and the media teleconference on Wednesday — the very same Wednesday that has been described to you above — there is no debate to be had about that. It was selfish, classless and thoughtless. Wait a damn week.
Yes, 23XI was one of the teams collecting relief donations. You can read all about it on their social media timelines, after you scroll through their joint statement about the lawsuit.
I listened to that teleconference while en route to Charlotte Motor Speedway, watching those donations roll by me on the highway and watching those aircraft taking off above me. I was there delivering our own contributions with my wife. Five days earlier, she was stuck atop a mountain above Lake Lure, North Carolina, stranded like so many others because the entire village of Chimney Rock below her had vanished. Helene took a giant broom and swept it all into the lake.
It was one of those NASCAR team-owned helicopters that saved her, perilously plucking her off of that mountainside. As the helicopter rose, she was rocked by realization, her first chance to look down onto that lake that was now filled with the debris that had been every restaurant, store and lakeside spot where we have spent so much of our lives together, and where we had been living this fall. As soon as she was dropped off in Concord, that chopper turned and went back to pick up more hurricane victims. And then it did it all over again. And again. And again. And again. It hasn’t stopped since. Trying to deliver that hope.
Perhaps those who decided that the NASCAR community should take a break from those efforts and listen to their complaints about revenue sharing and slices of billion-dollar pies should take one of those flights. Drivers, owners, NBA legends, lawyers, all of them.
I’m sure the folks who just lost everything would love to express their opinion on it all. I’m also sure that the others in the NASCAR world would, too. But not this week. They’re too busy helping.