Despite winning four times this year at Oxford Plains Speedway, Austin Teras’ season record still showed a technical zero in the Pro All Stars Series win column.
Friday night, he fixed that.
The reigning Oxford 250 champion came on strong in the second half of Friday’s Kennebec Equipment Rental 150 PASS 150, picking up his first PASS North win since 2023 and firing a warning shot for Sunday’s big-money Spencer Group Paving PASS 400.
Friday’s race kicked off PASS’ season-finale weekend with a 150-lap tilt that had been rescheduled multiple times through the season, finally settling on the last option available without taking some of the impact out of Sunday’s main event.
With a potential $100,000 and three races’ worth of championship points on the line Sunday, Friday’s race was merely a warmup.
Brandon Barker started out front for the warmup, holding the lead through the first fifty laps as Teras and company carved their way through traffic.
Barker and Teras eventually broke free from the pack, gapping third place by several seconds as Teras turned up the heat on the race leader. On lap 95, Teras finally made his move on Barker to take the top spot.
A lap-115 restart gave Barker a shot to take the lead back, but Teras powered back to the point seven laps later.
Teras had the win in hand on the final lap when the third-place battle devolved into chaos, with Max Cookson and Gabe Brown making contact down the backstretch. As the field scattered in his mirror, Teras held on to win by just over a second over Barker.
Johnny Clark dodged the mayhem to steal third at the line. Championship rival D.J. Shaw finished fourth after the fracas, with Sylas Ripley rounding out the top five.
Celebration of America 300 winner Garrett Hall came home sixth, with Alexendre “Fireball” Tardif seventh. Cookson, in only his second PASS start of the season, limped home eighth, while Brandon Varney and Ryan Kuhn were ninth and tenth.
Clark’s podium finish gave him an incremental boost in the championship standings, closing his deficit to five markers behind Shaw entering the final three points-paying races of the season.
Teras has not run for points this year, instead running a schedule that has largely revolved around the speedway nearest his Gray, Me. roots.
That schedule has not played out without challenge. A PASS win early this season was overturned at the tech shed. A certain podium finish in July’s Celebration of America 300 was dashed by late-race contact, with additional penalties following for Teras’ retaliation.
Regardless, Teras picked up three feature wins at Oxford through the summer, then put on a dominant performance in August’s Oxford 250, delivering a long-awaited victory for father Jay Cushman.
While the Oxford 250 has traditionally been part of the PASS North points championship, the sanctioning body took a different approach this year, wrapping Oxford’s three major events into a triple crown and paying no points toward the PASS standings.
In a curious twist, then, Teras’ last PASS North win came in a Friday-night rain-rescheduled race that opened the 2023 PASS 400 weekend.
Sunday’s PASS 400 format, revised from past years, divides the titular distance into three segments, two 100-lap dashes and a 200-lap third segment, with the starting lineup of the second and third segments dictated by a full-field invert.
As opposed to prior runnings of the three-stage PASS 400, each segment pays full championship points, spelling out a particular strategy for Shaw, Clark, Trevor Sanborn and the others still in the running for the season-long crown.
The prize purse, though, prescribes a different strategy. An aggregate score will determine the purse payout through the field, with $25,000 to the “overall” winner. But each segment pays a $25,000 bounty solely to the winner. A driver who manages to sweep the segments against all odds could take home $100,000.
Teras, Barker, Joey Doiron and a host of other drivers will be solely aiming at the big trophy and the colossal purse. But the points race and the championship bounty, at least for multi-time champions like Clark and Shaw, pale in comparison to the pot of gold at the end of the 400-lap rainbow.
And even though strategy, not raw speed, will likely dictate Sunday’s big winners, the path to the PASS 400 win still goes through Teras and team.
Unofficial Results
PASS North | Kennebec Equipment Rental PASS 150
Oxford Plains Speedway, Oxford, Me.
1. (29) Austin Teras
2. (32) Brandon Barker
3. (54) Johnny Clark
4. (60) D.J. Shaw
5. (09) Sylas Ripley
6. (94) Garrett Hall
7. (21QC) Alexendre Tardif
8. (39) Max Cookson
9. (12V) Brandon Varney
10. (72K) Ryan Kuhn
11. (73D) Joey Doiron
12. (28) Will Collins
13. (5X) Bobby Therrien
14. (47) Gabe Brown
15. (5M) Max Rowe
16. (44) Trevor Sanborn
17. (72R) Scott Robbins
18. (18VT) Kaiden Fisher
19. (10) Charlie Buxton
20. (72C) Cassius Clark
21. (01) Steven Chicoine
22. (7W) Shane Webber
23. (5VT) Pat Corbett
24. (60B) Tim Brackett
25. (12S) Dennis Spencer, Jr.
26. (9) Chip Grenier
27. (61) T.J. Brackett
28. (50) Jeremy Davis
29. (18) Michael Scorzelli
Read more Short Track Scene:
