Jason Terry, the suspect in the theft of Team Xtreme's #44 Sprint Cup car from a hotel near Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Georgia on the Friday of this year's Atlanta race weekend the week after the Daytona 500, has plead guilty to that February 27 incident. Team Xtreme had gotten Travis Kvapil to drive their #44 Chevrolet in the 500-mile Cup race at Atlanta on March 1 (which happened to be Kvapil's 39th birthday). That Friday morning, the day of the first practice session and qualifying for the race, crew members discovered that the car had gone missing from the team's trailer at their hotel near the track. The team, one of the least funded and financially worst-off organizations in the series, did not have a backup car for that reason. Team Xtreme had to withdraw the #44 car from the race as they searched for the car, leaving Kvapil, who this year has primarily driven in the Camping World Truck Series, out of what was to be a great opportunity returning to NASCAR's top series.
Early Saturday morning, February 28, the car was found dumped in a forest in Loganville, Georgia, about 50 miles east of Hampton. NASCAR and law enforcement officials struggled to understand why someone would steal a NASCAR vehicle and then dump it in a seemingly random location, but they soon had a suspect in Jason Terry. On Monday, as Terry delivered his guilty plea, Team Xtreme called the five-month-old incident "very damaging" to the organization as a whole, something previously hinted at just a couple of weeks after the car theft when it was revealed that team owner John Cohen hadn't paid his employees in "a long time," as well as the team's withdrawal from a number of Cup races after Atlanta.
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