Darrel Wong
It’s been almost six years since Colby Solomon and his brother Rob moved to Fresno from Idaho so they could race sprint cars.
Rob’s girlfriend, Sherrill, moved with them. That was 2003. They wanted to race on dirt tracks, and Idaho just doesn’t have many.
Rob is 36 now, Colby 31. They both learned the trade from their dad, not just racing, but actually building the cars. Back in Idaho, their dad welds rigs for hauling potatoes. “Spud trailers,” they call them. Rob just opened a chassis-building shop called “Speed Tech.”
In summer 2005, after all that, he had run just two races when he was a victim in a series of racing thefts. Someone stole his pickup, which was attached to his trailer, which was filled with his parts and tools and, most importantly, his race car.
When they finally found Colby’s trailer and car, there wasn’t a lot to salvage. It looked like there might be a break in the case when two months later a guy wandered into the shop where Colby was working and said he had some gears to sell. Colby knew they were his, so he called the police and they set up a sting operation.
It worked, too, but the guy said he’d bought them from someone else and the police let him go. Colby says now that he knows the police have more important matters, murders to investigate and such, but at the time it was frustrating. He said he was done with racing and sold his motor to pay off his credit cards. He bought a ‘68 Cadillac Coupe de Ville from a guy in Colorado, hoped it would be enough to distract himself from racing. (He ended up selling the car for a 50% loss.)
It wasn’t. He moped, struggled to find motivation, felt like he weighed 300 pounds instead of half that. Six months later, he did the only thing he knew: Started building a sprint car again.
Who knows what drives a man? Childhood memories maybe, all those Sunday afternoons driving Go Karts back in Idaho. The idea of winning. The fear of failing. It’s hard to say. “I know I can do this,” he says. “I just can’t give up yet.”
At least three nights a week Colby works on the car, a thin frame tinkering on a thin frame, long into the night. The motor is torn apart at another shop now because a rocker arm broke and it gets more complicated from there. But he thinks he’ll be ready to race at Kings Speedway in Hanford in June.
They’d all like to think this is the summer Colby Solomon finally passes whatever test is being administered. Lord knows he’s suffered enough.
