Garrett Hall holds the checkered flag after winning the PASS 150 on Sunday at Oxford Plains Speedway. Staff photo by Travis Barrett
OXFORD — While others stood around him running through all the woulda-coulda-shoulda scenarios, Scarborough’s Garrett Hall stood speechless in victory lane.
Hall caught up to D.J. Shaw in lapped traffic and then cleared him on a restart with 15 laps remaining, pulling away to the Honey Badger Bar & Grill 150 win Sunday evening for his first career win in the Pro All Stars Series at Oxford Plains Speedway. Shaw held on for second, while Farmington’s Cassius Clark finished third.
Hall, who now has four career PASS wins, simply managed his tires for the end of the race better than everybody else in the 33-car field.
“I was honestly saving the whole race,” Hall said. “All of a sudden, I was outside of (Shaw) on a restart, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to make sure I get him on the restart.’”
Shaw led 92 laps in the middle stages of the race, yet he’s still searching for his first win in six years at Oxford. A three-time series champion, he has just one victory at the track — in 2013 — in an 11-year PASS career.
“It’s a love-hate thing. Sometimes we’re good, sometimes we’re bad (at Oxford),” Shaw said. “Johnny (Clark) said last year when he did the same thing, you don’t know whether to be happy or sad when you’ve led that much and lost. He’s right. You don’t know what to think.”
Nova Scotia driver Cole Butcher and 2018 Oxford track champion Gabe Brown of Center Conway, New Hampshire, rounded out the top five. Derek Griffith, Mike Rowe, Alan Tardiff, Travis Benjamin and Ashton Tucker finished sixth through 10th, respectively.
Reid Lanpher of Manchester, who won at Oxford last October, finished 32nd after being collected in an early accident. Five-time Oxford PASS winner Curtis Gerry of Waterboro had mechanical trouble on lap 27 and finished 27th, two laps down to Hall.
Clark had likely the fastest car among the leaders in the closing stages of the race, but he didn’t have enough to pull off a late pass of Shaw even after getting to his bumper in the final five circuits.
“You don’t like watching cars drive away from you by any means, obviously,” Clark said. “They had just enough left. They didn’t have much left at the end. I had a little more car, but I didn’t have anything the rest of the race to get any track position.”
In the end, the day belonged to Hall, even after not cracking the top five in the running order until after the midway point of the event.
“I’m in shock, honestly,” Hall said. “When I first started out and you’re just learning, it’s different when you just race Beech Ridge and Oxford. It’s smooth and you just maintain. It’s not really a wheeling, hard track. It’s just maintaining and being consistent. I think that’s what won the race today.”
“I didn’t know how fast to go,” Shaw said of his pace while leading. “I tried to go as slow as I could, but it just progressively got looser and looser. I was afraid of that going in.”
In the first half of the touring series doubleheader, the American Canadian Tour’s carnage-filled main event was shortened to 125 laps — just enough to turn up the pressure on those pacing themselves at the front of field.
Newmarket, New Hampshire’s Bryan Kruczek swapped the lead with Joey Polewarczyk four times in a span of eight laps, with Kruczek pulling away to his first career ACT victory.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Kruczek said.
Polewarczyk, of Hudson, New Hampshire, couldn’t stay close to Kruczek, who pulled away to a margin of victory of nearly two full seconds.
“I wish I could have been a little closer on the last lap, but that’s racing,” said Polewarczyk of the wrestling match between he and Kruczek for the lead with less than 20 laps remaining.
Jimmy Hebert, Chip Grenier and Rich Dubeau completed the top five. Former ACT champions Scott Payea and Wayne Helliwell Jr. finished ninth and 17th, respectively, in the 36-car field.
In other feature racing, Matt Sanborn of Windham led every lap to win the 40-lap PASS Modified event. It was Sanborn’s first career win in the division.
“This is just a PASS Mod race, but to me this is the world,” Sanborn said.
Pownal’s Kenny Harrison outlasted Billy Childs of Leeds and Gary Babineau of Hollis to win the 50-lap Street Stock feature. Jimmy Childs took the checkered flag in the 50-lap Northeast Mini Stock Tour event.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
