It’s certainly not the way Matt Sheppard wanted to sell some souvenirs, but it’s one way to recoup some of the loss. He got caught up in a major pileup during the Super DIRTcar Series feature at Selinsgrove Speedway on June 4.
“Everyone got bottled up on the restart,” said Sheppard. “I got jammed up, hooked, and spun around — and then everyone piled in.”
Despite a destroyed Bicknell modified, he walked away without injury. On Facebook he said, “… if you are a racer this is your sign to make sure your safety equipment is top notch.”
“I wanted to remind racers to make sure they have a good seat, [as well as] up-to-date belts, head-and-neck restraint, helmet, and all other safety items,” Sheppard said. “Even my Schultz fuel cell had a can that was all wrecked, but the bladder held all the fuel.”
Sheppard sat in a full-containment seat from The Joie of Seating with Impact belts. He wore an Impact helmet paired with a HANS device.
“I was a little sore — nothing crazy — because of the wreck,” said Sheppard, who finished third at Land of Legends Raceway two nights later. “It will take some time to bounce back financially from this crash. Everything on the car was a write-off.”
Not everything, necessarily. Matt Sheppard offered body panels from the wrecked car on Facebook. The roof immediately sold for $500.
“There is a lot of desire from fans to have body panels to hang in garages or barns,” Sheppard said. “We’ve sold body panels before — like from the body of a one-off paint scheme for a special event like Oswego [Super Dirt Week]. The panels get swallowed up quickly — they’re considered collector’s items.”
Those collector items will help Sheppard recover some of the losses from the wreck.
“Every bit of that money will go back into the cars,” said Sheppard.
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.
