Why a tilt trailer? Well, for one thing, it makes getting the water out of your race car easier after washing it. Simply point the nose of car skyward and let gravity do the rest. However, there are more reasons than that for why Pat Norcia built it other than drying the sports modified his son John drives.
Pat, whose family owns the Norcia Corporation truck shop, built the trailer in 1987 when he raced. He later passed it on to his son.
“The trailer was built out of necessity,” Pat said. “My father used to have an old flatbed wrecker to take his car to the track. It became old and outdated. With a family-owned truck shop, we figured it would be easier to build a trailer from scratch that could do everything we needed it to do.”
With their experience of building recycling trailers for local municipalities, they came up with this trailer. The Norcia family started with two 7000-pound Dexter axles, threw in some hydraulics off dump trucks, and then started welding away.
“It is both a roll-back wrecker and also can dump to load or unload cars — or garbage containers or special equipment,” Pat said. “There are only six or seven open trailers when we show up at Bridgeport Motorsports Park, but the others need ramps and winches to load and unload. Ours is simple — no ramps needed — because of the angles we can achieve.”
While other racers have moved away from open trailers, the Norcias still prefer their tilt trailer. They can even use it as a level table to set up and work on their car, with no bending over necessary.
“It is in excellent condition — built the right way, built nice and painted well,” Pat said. “You wouldn’t know if our trailer is a couple years old or 40 years old.”
And in the event of a crashed race car, the tilt trailer makes easier work out of hauling the wreckage.
“Our son is in his third season of racing,” Pat said. “In his first two seasons he found the turn four wall at New Egypt too many times. Our trailer came in handy.”
Racers have approached Pat about building them a tilt trailer, but he always says no.
“I’m too old at 62 to take on a project like that again,” Pat said. “We are very busy at our shop with new municipal truck builds, and garbage truck repairs are always backed up out the door, not to mention the day-to-day stuff.”
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.
