For Nick Hoffman, the road from Mooresville, NC to Maryville, TN led him through Illinois.
No, he didn’t type the wrong Knoxville into his GPS. Rather, it wasn’t long after returning from a month of racing at Volusia Speedway Park that Hoffman realized he had a problem on his hands.
“We were having generator issues down in Florida and I ended up deciding to just order a brand new generator,” Hoffman said. “That took about a week and a half to get here, so we received it early last week. Pedulla Excavating, Stephen Pedulla takes care of all my maintenance, my diesel mechanic side of things, so we fired it up to take it over to his shop and it ran for a minute then shut off and died.
“So we were like, ‘that’s kind of weird.’ We went to fire it back up and it wouldn’t start. We started doing diagnosis stuff, looking online at some of the issues we were having, and it all led towards the injector caps going bad on these Cummins motors and that was exactly the case.”
From there, Hoffman called in a little help from his friends in the Late Model pits and quickly discovered that it wasn’t going to be a quick fix.
“We had to call up Bobby Koehler, the owner of Koehler Motorsports and he owns Ultimate Towing,” Hoffman said. “He brought a truck out here to tow it to a dealership up the road. They got it tore apart and realized it was going to need a cylinder head and everything. It wasn’t a job that was going to be able to be done in a week. If it wasn’t an Outlaw race, sure, I could have just hooked up to my little enclosed trailer and been fine. But with it being an Outlaw race and we’re racing for points and everything else, I can’t take that chance and not have a backup car and all my spare stuff.
“So, I called around to a couple different customers of mine, customers of Tye [Twarog] and everything and ended up with C&W Trucking, which is a huge supporter of ours. They also race, they had a toter home that they won’t be using for a couple weeks up in Illinois and they told me to just come get it.”
He didn’t waste any time accepting the offer. A few days later, Hoffman was off to the airport for an impromptu trip to the Land of Lincoln.
“I flew up there [Tuesday], left Charlotte at two [o’clock] and landed there at four,” Hoffman said. “I was there a max of 15 minutes, jumped in the truck and drove it straight home. Stopped one time and I made it in about 14 hours. Long night, pulled in my shop right at 7 a.m., got a couple hours of sleep and I’m back at it.”
Hoffman went right back to work upon returning to North Carolina on Wednesday. With two days to go until race day at Smoky Mountain, he had to get his new toter set for a weekend in Tennessee and make sure his race cars were ready for battle in the World of Outlaws Tennessee Tipoff, all while his decommissioned toter awaits the repairs necessary to return to service.
“They should get the parts by the end of this week and hopefully have it fixed by midweek next week is the hope and prayer,” Hoffman said. “But then we’ve still got to put a generator in it, so we’re still looking at a couple days after that. I would say we’re going to use this one for at least the next two weeks and then hopefully have it done for the following one.”
With the World of Outlaws Late Models set to return to action Friday and Saturday, Hoffman is hungry for a pair of strong showings in the Tennessee hills to make all the extra effort worthwhile. The stat sheet says “The Thrill from Mooresville” should be a contender, as he went two-for-two in top 10s last June in the Mountain Moonshine Classic in his first starts on the reconfigured 3/8-mile track.
“Just like any other southern racetrack, you better qualify good,” Hoffman said. “I feel like the track will probably be pretty similar. The way the weather’s going to be coming up into Friday, we shouldn’t really see any rain. The temperatures are up, so the track should be pretty similar to what it was.
“I’m sure they probably made more changes during the offseason, but it’ll be a tough show either way. We’re going to have everybody there, so it’ll be tough for all of us.”
Hoffman and the rest of the World of Outlaws Late Models will head to Maryville, TN for the Tennessee Tipoff at Smoky Mountain Speedway on Friday and Saturday, March 14-15.
If you can’t make it to the track, stream every lap live on DIRTVision.