OXFORD — Travis Benjamin hoped he wouldn’t wake up.
“I’m waiting to wake up and having this day start all over again,” Benjamin said Sunday night after becoming just the fourth driver in history to win the Oxford 250 for a third time in his career.
If it’s a dream come true for the Morrill driver, it’s not one he’ll have to wake from. Benjamin led the final 40 laps of the 46th annual Oxford 250 and held off Derek Griffith and D.J. Shaw on a pair of restarts inside the final 12 laps, joining Dave Dion, Ralph Nason and Mike Rowe as the only drivers to ever win one of the most prestigious short-track races in America three times.
In a race that featured Rowe himself, two-time winner Ben Rowe, six-time Pro All Stars Series champion Johnny Clark, and a total of nine previous Oxford 250 champions on the starting grid, Benjamin’s small Peter Petit-owned team proved its mettle.
In what qualified as an oddball version of the race itself, with no fewer than seven drivers taking turns leading the 44-car field and at least that many certainly fast enough to have laid claim to hopes of victory, it was Benjamin who dialed up the right pit strategy to ensure he was the best when it mattered most.
Following a two-tire pit stop just shy of the 100-lap mark, Benjamin took on four new tires with 71 laps remaining before driving straight to the head of the class.
“This race, it’s pit strategy,” said the 40-year-old Benjamin, who has won the 250 three times in a seven-year span dating back to consecutive wins in 2013-14.
No driver has ever won four Oxford 250s, though Benjamin believes he probably should have. He led 159 laps in 2017 but finished second to Wayne Helliwell Jr. of Pelham, New Hampshire.
“(Helliwell) that year, he changed up his strategy,” Benjamin said. “We led a lot of laps that year, and he knew he couldn’t beat us. So he came in and got tires and won the race. Good for him — pit strategy is huge in this race.”
Travis Benjamin, with his father Ronnie and son Kaiden, celebrates winning the Oxford 250 at Oxford Plains Speedway on Sunday. The 250 win is Benjamin’s third, which ties him for the most in the race’s history. Brewster Burns photo
Even by lap 200 Sunday night, Benjamin was not convinced he still had enough car to win. He knew he was in contention, at the very least, but changing track conditions throughout the two-hour race baffled many teams.
Most cars running in the top 20, given all but four cars made their final pit stops together on lap 179, ran very similar speeds and were tightly packed together all night.
“At the beginning of this race, I thought we were pretty good,” Benjamin said. “Guys would take off, then they’d fall off. At one time, I could go anywhere on the outside. Then 10 laps later, I couldn’t do nothing out there. Then I’d go to the bottom, and I’d be horrible when I was pretty good there sometimes. I was like, ‘How can that even be possible?’ You just kind of had to go all over the place.
“It was just a really weird race.”
A weird race, perhaps, but one which Benjamin captured.
The record books won’t have an asterisk next to the year. Nobody will be able to say that Benjamin — a two-time PASS champion — won a third with some kind of qualifier to follow.
Benjamin joined three of the best northern New England race car drivers in the history of the sport this weekend. And the 13-time PASS race winner, with a couple of 250-lap wins in Canada on his resume, too, still thinks his team hasn’t hit its stride after a season with only one previous top-five finish (at Thunder Road International Speedbowl in Barre, Vermont, in May).
“I just can’t believe it, to have our name on that trophy again,” Benjamin said. “And this field is stacked. It’s freaking stacked.(2018 Oxford 250 winner and Georgia native) Bubba Pollard comes here — Bubba can win anywhere in the country — and he comes up here and we’re lapping him. That tells you who’s racing up here.
“Nothing against the guys down south, but I’ve got 20 years (doing this) and most of those kids down south aren’t even 20 years old. You look at Mike Rowe, Johnny, Cassius (Clark). We’re not young kids. We’ve raced a long time.
“This racing up here is the best in the country, I’ll say that, hands-down.”
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