Rekindling the Spirit : After Surviving a Costly Fire, Sylmar Driver Strives to Keep Pastime From Going Up in Smoke

Jim Thirkettle has had his fair share of crashes in a sport that consists of driving a very loud car at very high speeds. In 1974, his car slammed into a wall and he broke several ribs. A few other times he has crashed into a wall or another car and suffered concussions, drifting off into the Land of Oz for a few minutes before waking up.

But the crash that dealt Thirkettle his biggest setback came about six hours after a race. He had raced in Roseville, near Sacramento, and was towing his car back to his home in Sylmar in June, 1987, when the truck’s drive shaft broke, punctured a fuel tank and set the entire rig on fire.

“All we had time to do was get out of the truck and unhitch the trailer and the car,” he said. “That was it. We lost everything else. All of our tools, our spare engines and transmissions and all of our spare parts. When the fire department showed up the truck was just 3 feet high and still melting.”

Thirkettle was left with a slightly singed race car owned by Red Meacham of Bakersfield--and nothing else. It was like having a baseball bat, but no baseball. A pair of swimming goggles, but no pool. A set of golf clubs, but no loud clothing.

“Let’s say it really put a dent in our racing efforts,” Thirkettle said. “We’ve just now replaced everything. It hasn’t been a good time.”

Thirkettle, 43, has been racing for 20 years. He began, as most Valley-area racers do, smoking around the track at Saugus Speedway in a car held together by some bolts, a few spot welds and other bonding material. He was one of the successful drivers, though, so he kept moving up. Through the mid-1970s and into the ‘80s he raced primarily in Bakersfield, winning nearly half of his starts.

But in 1986 he decided to make another leap, this time to the NASCAR Southwest Tour. It would have been a tough transition under ideal conditions. But when just about everything he owned melted in the truck fire on Interstate 5, it seemed like a lost cause.

He had not fared well in his first NASCAR races in 1987 and then was forced to sit out for two months after the fire. When he and his crew put enough tools and spare parts back on the shelf to resume racing, he returned and entered five races. He won only once.

And although nothing of his has melted in 1988, this has been an even worse year for Thirkettle.

The first Southwest Tour race was in Phoenix in February and Thirkettle’s car blew a clutch and he did not finish. In the second race, at Bakersfield, his car blew a tire near the end of the race and he finished ninth. A month later, at Bakersfield, he crashed midway through the race and did not finish. Two weeks later, at Sears Point, he crashed into a wall and did not finish. Next came a race at Madera, near Fresno, and nothing snapped, cracked or crashed and he finished fifth.

On June 11, he went into the biggest race of the Southwest Tour season so far brimming with confidence after powering his car to the fastest qualifying lap to win the pole position.

“We had just gotten the new motor pieces and we really thought we had turned it all around,” Thirkettle said. “We were really feeling good about racing again.”

And they continued feeling good until the third-to-last lap, when Thirkettle was running second, greasing the bumper of leader and eventual winner Ron Esau. Suddenly, Thirkettle’s car was sideways, spinning off the track and into the dirt on the second turn. His car had collided with a car driven by Troy Beebe, the current Southwest Tour points leader, and by the time Thirkettle had regained control and maneuvered his car back onto the track, he was in seventh place. That’s where he finished.

“Racers are eternally optimistic people,” said Thirkettle, a project engineer for Easton Aluminum in Van Nuys who must fit his passion for racing into his spare time.

“We thought good things would happen for us this year, even though we knew we were still recovering from the fire. Now we’re just trying to keep our heads above water until all the bad luck passes.

“It’s hard to keep a good attitude when you’ve had this many problems. After a while, it gets tough to bear. When you’ve run half a dozen races and think you should have won two or three of them but you haven’t won anything, it starts playing on your mind.”

When he first started racing, Thirkettle dreamed of getting all the breaks and driving his way to the big time, the NASCAR Grand National circuit.

“For a time at the beginning I entertained the notion of doing this exclusively, doing it for a living,” he said. “I saw Richard Petty and those guys and figured I might make it if the right deals came along. But a deal like that never came along. They seldom do.”

And if he needed any more reminders that Petty and Bobby Allison and Darrell Waltrip race in a different world, he got two of them in 1978 when he raced twice in the Grand National series, the first time at Ontario Motor Speedway and then at the Riverside Raceway. He finished 10th in the first race and eighth in the second, which doesn’t sound all that bad. But Thirkettle knew that both performances were perfect, that everything had gone right.

“In both of them I ran my brains out, ran as hard as I can run a car,” he said. “Our mechanical work was perfect, too. And after running as hard as we possibly could all day long, all 500 miles, we still finished 10th and eighth, way off the lead pack. It seemed so futile. We just couldn’t compete. It was a bad feeling. We had given it our best shot but it still wasn’t good enough to run with those guys.”

Thirkettle did not, however, throw in the wrench. He had learned early that driving race cars carries no guarantees, except perhaps for the guarantee that something, sooner or later, is going to go wrong.

And even though most of his competitors are a few years younger than him, Thirkettle has no intention of quitting soon. He has learned how to ride out the bad times.

“If you let every little discouragement get to you, you wouldn’t race very long,” he said.