At least Matt Smith knew who took his Pro Stock Motorcycle parts and equipment. His former business partner made off with the items in question during the night at Charlotte last Sunday.

Top Fuel rookie Audrey Worm doesn’t have that luxury.

Her trailer was robbed this week near Knoxville, Tenn., as her small-budgeted Leverich Racing team traveled here from North Carolina. As of Friday afternoon, as they prepared to compete in the NHRA Southern Nationals at Atlanta Dragway, she and husband/crew chief Aaron Grant hadn’t heard any updates from the Knox County, Tenn., police.

“We have a case number, so I guess we can just keep checking on it with the case number. I hope they find something, but I don’t know,” Worm said. “We said it’s the dumbest stuff to steal, because it’s not like you can run it on the street. Everyone said it will end up showing up, because someone will try to sell it to somebody that we know, and one of these big teams will say, ‘Well, yeah, that’s Audrey’s parts.’ Both the heads have serial numbers, and the pit bike has a serial number, and the supercharger has a serial number.”

Both Worm and Grant said if the stolen items reappeared, they might or might not be useable. “They would probably be fine. We would just have to look them over and see what we can run and what we can’t run. All the racks that they took had brand-new stuff in them, and the supercharger was a really good, newer supercharger.”

Worm said at first she hesitated to post news of the theft onto her Facebook page, “but I said it doesn’t hurt to get more eyes out there. The last I checked [Friday morning], 291 people shared it to get it out there nationally. So, I mean, we’ve got to come up with something with that many eyes and fans that are out there trying to help us find our stuff.”

She has had plenty of offers for help since she arrived here.

“Terry McMillen said, ‘Come over with anything [you] need.’ Tim Wilkerson gave us a whole bunch of pins and buttons to build our racks. [Jack] Beckman’s guys just dropped off three impact guns to use for the weekend, because our impact guns got stolen.”

“We got here around 1:30 and just kind of looked through the trailer to see what we had and what we didn’t have. We had some parts coming to get shipped in that we could use,” Worm said. “But my husband builds all the racks and stuff and he’s like, ‘They took all my good parts, and now we have bent pistons and all the pistons we scuffed last weekend in Charlotte.’ So he was worried about putting racks together.”

She said that so far, the team is recovering “pretty good,” especially after “working hard on it all last night. They [crew] left here at 3:30 in the morning [Friday], came back to the hotel around 4 o’clock. So they’re on minimal sleep, but we’re out here to win rounds, so we got to do what we got to do.”

Worm wasn’t ready to make a pass in Friday’s opening qualifying session. She qualified 11th in the cooler night session, despite a flash-bang about halfway down the 1,000-foot course.

The experience is a huge disappointment for the racer who plans to be a candidate for the Auto Club of Southern California Road to the Future Award that honors the NHRA pro ranks’ top rookie driver. She advanced in her first-round quartet at Charlotte last Sunday and had hoped to build on that success.

“Oh yeah, I was ecstatic last weekend. I was jumping up and down, and I was getting all emotional,” Worm said. “I couldn’t believe just the help that we got from Antron’s guys and Beckman’s guys and Tasca’s guys. I was sitting in the car ready to warm up, and I just started crying.” She said the crew suddenly became worried. “They all thought something happened,” Worm said. “I’m like, ‘No, I’m happy-crying’. I said, ‘All these guys don’t have to come over and do this for me.’ I felt so honored that they would come over and help us get back out there for Round 2.”

Worm and Leverich Racing are planning to enter nine more events this year.

“I told all the guys, ‘Now we just got to get ourselves on TV, winning [a] round, and then I can say on TV, ‘Hey, everyone that took my stuff, we kind of need that back.”’