Travis Kvapil Car Stolen - Travis Kvapil and Team XTREME have been forced to pull out of Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup at the Atlanta Motor Speedway after their only available race car was stolen on Thursday night from a Morrow, Georgia parking lot.
The team's No.44 Chevrolet, valued at $250,000, was inside an unmarked dually trailer that was stolen from the Drury Inn parking lot in Murrow.
"All we know is it was a silver jeep," Team owner John Cohen said, adding that a surveillance camera captured the heist. "One guy got out and they pulled off together."
The surveillance footage features part of the heist; around 5:25 a.m. a new model silver or grey Jeep Cherokee is seen driving into the inn's parking lot. Two minutes later, at 5:32 a.m., it is seen leaving the property with the trailer.
Cohen also said the team didn't have a backup car in Atlanta and was forced to withdraw after the stolen race car wasn't present during Friday afternoon's NASCAR's mandatory inspection.
The team will enter the event next weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Travis Kvapil, who was looking forward to his 2015 appearance at the NASCAR series, was taken aback by the news. He didn't think the race car was stolen when crew members texted him that there was "trouble with the car."
"I thought maybe something happened in tech (inspection) or NASCAR was going to confiscate it or something like that," Kvapil said adding that it was until he received voicemails from colleagues that he understood the depth of the 'problem'.
"Come to find out we had big problems on the car."
"There's a lot of money inside that little trailer right now," Kvapil said. "For the team's sake and John Cohen's sake, hopefully it can be recovered. Otherwise it would be a really, really huge setback for the team."
Morrow Police, who received a report of the theft around 5:52 a.m., have began searching for the race car which was inside an unmarked white Sunbeam trailer that was being hauled by a black 2004 Ford F-350.
"Sometimes what happens when thieves see trailers, they might just assume there's something in the trailer they can go off and sell," Morrow Police Sgt. Larry Oglesby said. "Sometime when things like this occur, they will drop off the items in a parking lot somewhere-like a Walmart parking lot, once they realize what they have."
"They'll open it up and say, 'Oh my God, this is not what we thought it was. Let's get out of here.' And they'll take off and leave it sitting there. We're hoping they will be the situation so he can get back to his races this weekend, because they drove quite a distance to participate."
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