Without question some of the best week-to-week fields of sprint cars in America, both 305 and 410, are consistently found at Fremont Speedway and Attica Raceway Park. The purses are high, the equipment is good, the drivers are skillful and the fans are very loyal at both tracks. Those facts are well known. The purpose of this profile is to help shed a greater light on something that is seldom seen from the stands, yet it is just as commonplace as the great racing.

There is a bond with these racing teams that transends even the will to do everything possible to finish higher than your competitors. It is a common interest, a mutual respect. Some even call it an addiction.

Every weekday a dedicated crew member gets home from his full time job and promptly heads straight to the garage. Most of his spare time, and a great deal of his money goes directly into the race car. It's like having 2 full time jobs to many, yet their love of the sport makes it anything but cumbersome. 

Then finally raceday arrives. You pull into the pits and begin your normal pre-race routine. Somewhere in the course of the evening, you notice that a competitor has crashed, and he doesn't have enough time or help to get the car put back together for the next event. Knowing exactly how hard that team has worked to get to this day, you instinctively swing into action to help your friends.

This past Memorial Day an extraordinary chain of events took place in the pits at Fremont Speedway. But even more extraordinary is the fact that a similar scenario plays itself out again and again throughout the course of every racing season in this Northern Ohio hotbed. 

In this place the extraordinary becomes commonplace. This is the stuff that winners are made of.

Saving Matt Merrills Evening
All Photos By Steve Hartzell

So far, so good. Matt Merrill fires the engine for the first time.

A heat race crash did a lot of damage.

The crew was just about ready to pack it in for the night, but John Ivy's crew chief Guy Meyers thought differently of the situation, and began coordinating the repairs.

Soon a small army of helpers joined in to lend a hand to the effort. This included a number of crew members from competitor's teams who had abandoned their own cars to help out.

Caleb Griffith & Craig Mintz try to help fit up the spare wing. With no front-to-back adjustment available on the wing, it had to be removed and fitted with a slider mechanism.

Just in time, the car is ready to go and Matt Merrill's amazing runs in the B-Main & Feature races are the result. Had it not been for the efforts of his friends, the car would have been loaded up before dark.