The Chub Frank Fan Van

The boys in front of the Chub Frank 'Fan Van.'

During the afternoon of the World of Outlaws Late Model Series event at Ocala (Fla.) Speedway on March 25, a distinctive white van rolled through the pit gate and came to a stop in the middle of the pit area. Its right side was decorated with Chub Frank’s No. 1* and other decals from his car, its left side sported Rick ‘Boom’ Briggs’s No. 99b and his sponsor stickers – and its interior was stuffed with six young guys from western New York and Pennsylvania who had road-tripped to the Sunshine State on Spring Break.

Frank could only laugh when he saw the gang stream out of the vehicle they had dubbed the ‘Chub Frank Fan Van.’ “What a bunch of dumb-asses,” joked Frank, who rated so highly with the boys that they took a night off from partying at the beach to see him race at Ocala.

It was quite a southern excursion for the ‘Fan Van’ clan, a group of six students from Jamestown (N.Y.) Community College that included John Volpe, an upstart dirt Late Model driver from Lakeland, N.Y.; Volpe’s crew chief Joe Triscuit; ‘Boom’ Briggs crewman Mick Peters; D.J. Johnson; Andy Lata; and Jake Hyldahl. All of them were 20 years old, and only Hyldahl had never seen a dirt-track race before visiting Ocala.

The ‘Fan Van’ was born after the guys were informed that they couldn’t use Triscuit’s parents’ van for a second consecutive Spring Break trip. Proving their resourcefulness, last November they all chipped in to come up with $800 toward the purchase a 1998 Ford Econoline van that had been sitting in a used-car lot near their school. The van’s floor was rotted out thanks to its former life as an operations vehicle for a carpet-washing business, but the boys banded together to fix it up over the winter. They added a poker table in the middle, obtained decals directly from Frank and Briggs to slap on its flanks and got the van officially registered with license plates the day before they started the long drive to Florida on March 22.

While the van was no high-performance machine, it got the guys to Daytona Beach without any major problems after a marathon 24-hour, overnight drive. They spent a couple days at the World’s Most Famous Beach before heading to Ocala Speedway and then on to a few more sun-splashed days at other shore stops.

Volpe (top) and Peters in the Fan Van's bunk beds.

This was most definitely an economy trip for the Spring Breakers. There were no hotel rooms in their budget; they simply parked the ‘Fan Van’ in a Walmart parking lot each night and slept inside it – two guys in ‘bunks’ built in the back, three side-by-side on plywood placed over the poker table and one more on plywood resting over the front seats. They got showers in truckstops or in a hotel room that they were allowed to ‘rent’ for 15 minutes in the morning, and they ate on the cheap (except for a visit to an Olive Garden one night).

“We all put $140 in cash in an envelope at the start of the trip,” said Volpe. “We’ve just been working off that all week.”

How much did they have left after paying $30 apiece to get in Ocala’s pit area for a night of racing?

“We’re not sure,” quipped Volpe. “We’re not gonna look in the envelope. Hopefully we’ll make it through the week.”