CONCORD, N.C. — The next scheduled NASCAR race weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway is still a week and a half away, but on Wednesday afternoon, the 64-year-old racetrack was operating at full throttle.
Helicopters and jets streaked overhead. The squealing of air brakes produced by massive tractor-trailers filled the parking lots. Engines rumbled to life as convoys of digger line and bucket trucks rolled out, having waited in the lots adjacent to the speedway for their assignments, and suddenly headed to all points west into the Appalachian Mountains.
That’s where so many towns, valleys and hollers remain filled with helpless people. They are still stranded in the wake of Hurricane Helene, even now, nearly a full week since she vanished into the atmosphere.
“The goal is to carry supplies up there, but really it’s about delivering hope,” said one NASCAR team pilot alongside a hangar at Concord Regional Airport, the stock car community’s de facto air base located just across I-85 from Charlotte Motor Speedway. That motorsports air wing has been in constant motion this week. A temporary lighted street sign at the entrance to the airfield blinked: OPERATION AIR DROP. VOLUNTEERS GO STRAIGHT TO TERMINAL.
The people in the cockpits ask for anonymity because “that’s not what this is about,” but the man speaking here on a perfectly sunny Wednesday afternoon has been making nonstop round trips into the mountains since Saturday, the first morning after Helene tore through Florida, Georgia, Upstate South Carolina and directly over the border that joins East Tennessee and western North Carolina. He was one of many in the NASCAR community who became an impromptu air wing in 2010, delivering supplies to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
As multiple people were quick to remind on Wednesday, though, Helene felt worse. This wasn’t an island 1,200 miles away. This is a 40-minute helicopter flight. It’s home.
“Some of what we are doing is very specific, working with relief organizations to deliver supplies,” one pilot said, “but a lot of it has become as simple as seeing a family in an isolated house with no roads left to get out, waving and hoping we see them to get them out of…
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