Copperopolis man likes small cars, fast pace

Thomas Lieby, of Copperopolis, stands beside his race car, which can reach up to 150 miles per hour on the track. Maggie Beck/Union Democrat, copyright 2009

Thomas Lieby, 21, of Copperopolis, experienced one such event that presaged his future as a race-car driver. It started at the World Motor Sports exhibition at the San Jose Convention Center.
 

His father, Jim Lieby, loved motor sports. Jim had raced boats in his youth and owned a repair shop for boats of all types in Fremont. When the World of Motor Sports show arrived in San Jose, he took his 4-year-old son, Thomas, to see the collection.

“It was quite a show,” Jim recalled. “There were all kinds of vehicles there — boats, planes, cars and dragsters. Off in the corner there was a quarter midget booth.”

Quarter midgets are small cars that resemble go-carts, but with full frames and shocks. The man at the quarter midget booth noticed that Thomas’ eyes were glued to the shiny cars that were just his size.

“Do you like those, young man? Would you like to get in one?” Jim recalls the man saying. Thomas gave an excited affirmative, and clambered into the car.

“The rest, as they say, is pretty much history,” Jim said.

Flash forward 16 years.

Thomas attends Columbia College. He’s majoring in chemistry, plans to finish up at Stanislaus State University, and then hopes to go to University of the Pacific’s dental school. He commutes from Copperopolis to his job as a manager at Pizza Plus in Jamestown.

He still dreams of becoming one of the elite 43 who race in NASCAR, even if he looks at it more realistically than he did at 5.

As he tells the story of his first race, he thumbs through old photographs of himself at age 5, sitting in the little car in which he drove to victory.

The Stockton Indoor Championship was held in a big agricultural building with cement floors. The track was etched out in hay bales to give the kids something to hit if they spun out, his dad said.

Thomas dominated.

“I did a clean sweep,” he said. “I won the time qualifier, the two heat races and the main event.”

He had no idea how many laps he needed to complete, and after he’d finished the requisite number, his car spun out. Thinking that he’d lost, he started bawling.

“My parents ran up to me and said ‘You won, you won!’ They gave me a checkered flag and I got to go around and do my victory lap,” he said. He went home that night with a 4-foot-3-inch trophy that dwarfed him.

The family moved to Copperopolis not long after. Thomas’ mother, Denise, got a job as a plumber at Sierra Conservation Center. The three-car garage became the home base of Thomas’ racing obsession.   

The family lived off of Denise’s salary and funded racing with the funds that Jim’s repair shop brought in. They made it clear that if Thomas intended to race, he had to keep his grades above a C and help his dad maintain the cars.

"It may sound rugged and stiff, but my mother was a teacher and she always said, ‘You know what a C means, don’t you? Average,’ ” Jim said. “Don’t you think you’re better than average?”

Thomas did. A desire to be first characterized everything he did, from racing to grades to getting at the head of the line at school. That drive kept him in constant motion in the racing world, hopping from racing class to racing class.

His parents supported him, working around the prohibitive costs associated with buying and repairing cars that were good enough to compete.

“Financially, each class he went up to was more of a tap on the bankroll,” Jim said. “We never had big sponsors outside.”

People helped Thomas where they could.

Rusty Phillips, who works at Debco Automotive, donated oil and filters to keep Thomas’ cars running, and Sandy Fazio and Rhonda Forsberg of Signs Right Now, in Sonora, donated their considerable skill in applying numbers and graphics to the race cars.

The family’s biggest sponsor, however, was Thomas’ grandmother. Elizabeth Lieby didn’t much care for racing, but she dutifully watched her grandson as he whipped around turns and fought for position on the track. But he was placing in the middle of the pack, and Elizabeth wanted to know why.

“They’ve just got more horsepower and better motors,” Jim said.

“Well, let’s get him a motor then,” Elizabeth replied.

That 600 cc motor went into the Legends class car, a miniature look-a-like of a 1937 Ford that was Denise Lieby’s favorite. It was 15-year-old Thomas’ return to asphalt racing after a detour into dirt racing to hone his control of his car.

He placed third in national qualifiers in the Legends car, and top 10 in the nation for points accumulated through the season.

Thomas’ racing hit a wall when he was 19 and racing Grand American Modified cars at the Altamont Motorsports Park in Alameda. The angular cars were bigger than anything he’d driven before.

A 21-year-old hot shoe, a nickname for drivers with a heavy touch on the gas pedal, took him out at the start of the race with a punt to the left end of his car. The impact tossed Thomas’ car into a wall and several other cars T-boned him.

  The family didn’t have the money to repair the car.

“One guy, and racing was over. I was bummed,” Thomas said. “Nothing compares to the speed, being inches from the guy in front of you.”

Neither Jim nor Thomas wanted the racing to end. Cars were out of the question, but boat racing was not. Jim sold his new pearly yellow Harley-Davidson Roadster for the capital to buy a tunnel boat to get Thomas back in the game.  

The boats look like rocket ships on skis and go three G’s into a corner, slamming the drivers to the sides and knocking the wind out of them.  

“You float as high as you can, running on the rear of the boat,” Thomas said. “It’s exciting, you don’t feel anything, just hear the water underneath.”

In that first and only year, he won two of the five races and placed top two or three in the others against men who had been racing boats for 10 to 20 years.   

Thomas got back into cars when the family discovered a new class, the Sprints, that used such rigid rules that it leveled the playing field for people of all budgets.

“You can have all the engine you want, but it won’t do you any good,” Thomas said.

Thomas had to wait until he was 21 to enter into the class. He’s never driven the car before, and won’t have an opportunity to until April, when the tracks open for testing.

“This is a stepping stone,” Thomas said, “another opportunity to make it. I still enjoy school and I have the summers off to enjoy racing. It’s a nice life. I wouldn’t change it, even with the hardships.”