Within the span of 10 minutes, sportsman modified driver Zach Sobotka saw his race shop and family’s business devoured by fire. Sobotka, his father, Michael, and friend Jeremy Branne saved his two cars as flames surrounded them in the shop.
The trio were inside a recently purchased race trailer, which was parked next to the Parish, New York, facility. When Branne stepped out of the trailer, he saw smoke coming from inside the building and immediately yelled for help.
“We ran in, grabbed fire extinguishers, and we tried to put out the fire,” Sobotka, 21, said. “We thought we were succeeding. The fire seemed to keep reigniting.”
Sobotka notified his father and Branne. Together they helped to save the two race cars.
“We hooked my dad’s Dodge diesel pickup to the new trailer and pulled it to the road,” said Sobotka. “While the flames were getting closer, I backed my Chevrolet Silverado up to the garage, ran in with a chain, hooked it to the back of the new frame we were working on, and dragged it out to the top of a hill about 300 feet away. The flames were just a few feet away from us.”
Sobotka won a sportsman feature at Lake View Motor Speedway in South Carolina last month. (For more on Sobotka, read “Zach Sobotka: From 19th to the Win”.) He had just traveled to the Niagara Falls area to pick up his new trailer. Sobotka had also stopped at Bicknell Racing Products to purchase approximately $8,000 worth of parts for the new season.
“We lost a Bert transmission that was still in the box, a complete body for the new car, half of a new body for our other car, plus all the items we bought to put our new car together — wheels, tires, shocks, springs, and other parts,” Sobotka said.
Sobotka’s mother, Terry, and his father, Michael Sr., own the sandblasting and powder-coating business, Northern Coat & Blast, housed within the building.
“We lost our ’67 Chevelle and a Harley, and everything we used in the business — welders, plasma cutters, and the powder-coating machines,” said Terry Sobotka. “We believe the fire started in the back side of the shop, where there was a burning oven for the powder coating. The fire burned through the walls there, melted the safety valves on three large propane tanks, which spewed flames fueled by propane high into the sky. The heat was so intense that my mother-in-law’s house, which was next door, caught fire and its windows popped out.”
The volunteer fire department responded within minutes, but the shop was fully involved. They save the nearby house, but it suffered exterior damage.
“Everything is up in the air now,” Terry Sobotka said. “We definitely want to rebuild. The racing community has been awesome. People we don’t even know are offering us storage space. We’ve found out that there are really good people in the world. They care.”
Zach Sobotka intends to regularly race at a pair of two New York ovals. He’ll compete on Fridays at Brewerton Speedway and Saturdays at Land of Legends Raceway in Canandaigua.
“I’m getting lots of texts and calls offering me shop space and even cars to drive,” said Zach Sobotka. “We’re going to wait for the insurance investigation to be completed before we have a direction to proceed.”
Ellicia Solinsky, née Sobotka, organized a GoFundMe fundraiser for Terry and Mike Sobotka, and the rest of the family. To help the effort, follow this link.
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
