Raphaël Lessard spent the last two years dominating the Quebec-based Série ACT after developing his career in the Southeast.
This year, he’s showing the Milton CAT American-Canadian Tour what he’s made of.
Lessard wore out Kaiden Fisher and dusted D.J. Shaw on a late restart to win Saturday’s Milton CAT Midsummer Classic 250 at White Mountain Motorsports Park, his second ACT win of 2025.
But whether Lessard’s victory was decided on his forty-lap duel with Fisher or on the two-to-go restart, the Quebecer was not to be denied.
“Got a good run off of two, and took his lane a little bit, but still was a clean pass,” Lessard said of his battle with the sophomore Fisher. “So when I took the lead, I knew I was not gonna look back.”
The St.-Joseph-de-Beauce, Que. combatant carried the Vermont-based Late Model touring series into the second half of its schedule, leading the points standings in a season where no driver had yet to win twice. Lessard’s win came in early June at WMMP, with his worst finish an eighth-place run at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in the season-opening round.
Marking the halfway point of the schedule was the longest race of the year, one of few events where teams would be forced to entertain pit stops and tire strategy.
Heat wins for Jimmy Hebert, Justin Prescott and Gabe Brown, offset by past-winner handicaps for Brown and the other feature winners this season, helped shape the starting lineup. Former WMMP track champion Kasey Beattie took the pole alongside eight-time ACT Tour champ Brian Hoar. With most weekly WMMP competitors taking advantage of the off-weekend due to early-season rainouts, all thirty cars in attendance made the grid.
Beattie broke free of the pack to lead early. An early caution flag gave Hoar a shot at the lead, but Beattie kept the veteran at bay as Fisher surged to second. Prescott displaced his stepfather Hoar for third when the yellow flew on lap 29. Hoar then ducked into the pits under yellow, setting off the debate as to when to pit for tires and adjustments.
Out front, Beattie continued to hold the point, though Shaw was creeping up the running order and into third. When Tanner Woodard spun to bring out a third yellow on lap 63, Shaw had secured third behind Beattie and Fisher. Lessard, from the 14th starting spot, had fought his way to sixth.
With 37 laps to go before the lap-100 competition caution, Prescott and Lessard went to work on Shaw, with Lessard dicing his way to third. Beattie and Fisher were in command when the competition caution waved, with Lessard holding down third ahead of Prescott and Shaw. Teams were given five minutes for a fuel stop, with the option to come in separately for tires or adjustments.
After the field cycled through for the optional second stop, Beattie remained at the point with consi winner Nick Sweet, Bryan Mason, and Hoar rounding out the top-four. Lessard exited the pits in eighth, while Shaw was several positions behind him.
Sweet, making his first ACT Tour start since 2022, powered to the lead on the restart as Lessard carved his way through the top ten. After only 15 laps, Lessard was testing Sweet’s tenacity for the lead. Lessard worked over Sweet for four laps before completing the pass, taking the point as reigning champion Brown lost power and peeled off for the pits under green.
Beattie settled into third, with Derek Gluchacki fourth and early challenger Fisher battling to fifth as the field reached halfway. However, Beattie lost ground on the outside as Lessard and Sweet set a fast pace out front. Beattie had fallen to seventh when Rémi Perreault spun in turn three on lap 154. Sweet, Beattie and Jimmy Renfrew, Jr. pitted for further adjustments, cycling Fisher to second with Shaw and Gluchacki in his mirror. Renfrew stalled out on the restart, forcing a re-rack of the field for another attempt.
The field only made a few laps when Alexendre Tardif got together with Prescott, turning the Thunder Road regular off turn two and collecting Woodard in a hard backstretch impact. Lessard kept Fisher at bay on the next run, but contact between Pelkey and Perreault sent the Canadian for a hard ride into the turn-three tire barrier, scattering tires as far as the infield and forcing a brief red flag to reassemble the tire wall.
On the lap-167 restart, Fisher pounced on Lessard, taking the lead for the first time. The sophomore racer, a first-time Tour winner in June at Thunder Road, led his first four laps of the night before heat winner Hebert came to a stop with problems of his own on lap 171.
Fisher outgunned Lessard on the restart once again, but the two-time Série ACT champion was relentless, pushing the young leader as 2023 Midsummer Classic winner Jesse Switser pursued the pair in third. With fifty laps to go, Lessard turned up the heat, peeking to Fisher’s inside while defending Switser’s moves. Switser escalated the pressure on Lessard even as Lessard drew alongside Fisher for the lead. Fisher was ice-cold and composed, making the outside work as Lessard clung to the curbs.
But Fisher began to fade, giving a little more each lap to the hard-charging Lessard. With seven laps to go, Lessard finally poked his nose ahead, moving to the lead and leaving Fisher to hold off Switser for second.
Lessard was well ahead of the second-place battle when Switser got into Fisher in turn four, sending the reigning Thunder Road track champion for a spin. The yellow flag, not the white, flew with two laps still remaining on the scoreboard.
Switser was sent to the rear of the field. Shaw, who had been a distant fourth approaching the white flag, suddenly found himself in position to steal his second straight Midsummer Classic win.
The flagstand waved off Lessard’s first restart attempt as he got a jump on Shaw. On the second attempt, Lessard outmatched Shaw again, leaving the two-time Tour titlist to hold off Gluchacki.
With clear track ahead, Lessard drove to a .519-second advantage at the checkers, making him the first repeat winner of the 2025 Milton CAT American-Canadian Tour season.
But even if the last two laps looked easy, the green-flag duel with Fisher was anything but.
“It was super hard, especially when you have someone on your rear bumper trying to pass you, and trying to get to the lead too,” Lessard said. “It wasn’t a two-car battle where I could make moves and try anything. I had to think about my moves before doing them, when I had room, like a car length, two car lengths with the 25. But I think we had the fastest car and I just needed to get back to the front.”
Lessard had ample opportunities in the final laps to move Fisher out of the way, but that was not his planned path to the winner’s circle.
“The [lap-167] restart, when he took the lead, I feel like he took off before us, but they called it clear, so I guess it was fine,” he said. “I was kind of, at some point, he moved me up…I was just trying to be nice with him, and not be too aggressive, just make it happen clean. And then at the end, he just started fading a lot. I don’t know if I was applying so much pressure that at some point he burned his stuff up, and I knew my car was pretty good on long runs, so it wouldn’t fade as much.
“So when he started fading, I knew I had to make it happen.”
Shaw, the defending race winner, was relieved to come home second.
“We got to fourth there, and I used it hard to get by the 03,” he said. “And I continued to use it hard, because the leaders caught lapped traffic and…I don’t know. I think it was around 25 from the end, I really didn’t have anything left. And I stopped moving through lapped traffic and everything. I was kind of just where I was gonna be.”
Then the seas parted ahead of him. “I didn’t really love seeing a caution there, but fortunately it was two of the guys in front of me who were out of the picture,” he said. “So I was able to capitalize on the positions of it. But really, no tire left to make a run at the win. Some days you have to settle. I feel like probably a lot of people would be surprised to hear me say that. Maturing, I guess? Some days you just gotta realize that second is a gift and you don’t need to win.”
Shaw said that while Lessard may have gotten a jump on the final restart, he had little left to fight back with.
“He got a little jump, but my right front tire was so used up,” he explained. “And I’m sure he knew that. He’s a smart racer. I needed to fire in the middle of the corner, not in the entrance of the corner. And I had to be back off the throttle to just not be up the track and through his door. [I] lost one that way in the spring, and just wanted to not do that here. So I just let the cards fall where they may, and came away with better than I was thinking with ten to go.”
Gluchacki finished third, the latest up in an up-and-down season that has seen him score a win and two more podium finishes, but has also seen him finish outside the top twenty three times and skip one race with both of his cars sidelined.
Erick Sands took fourth place in the final run to the checkers, with mid-race leader Sweet finishing fifth.
Renfrew recovered from tire trouble to finish sixth, ahead of Jamie Swallow, Jr. Early leader Beattie struggled with late traffic but finished a strong eighth. Ryan Kuhn and Joey Polewarczyk rounded out the top ten.
Fisher ended his night in 11th, while Switser was 12th after his late-race penalty.
And while the two Vermonters returned to the paddock, Lessard celebrated his second Milton CAT American-Canadian Tour win of the season, quipping that the $10,000 winner’s purse would look even better with the Canadian exchange rate.
The 24-year-old made an early career move to the Southeast after a single year racing with the Pro All Stars Series. Development opportunities led to a deal with Toyota that culminated in a NASCAR Truck Series win for Kyle Busch Motorsports in 2020. But after the Toyota deal and his Quebec-based funding dried up, Lessard returned home, ultimately finding a ride with the powerhouse Larue Motorsports team.
And after back-to-back Série ACT championships, it was time to make another move.
“The last two years we’ve done two championships in the ACT Quebec,” Lessard said. “So I think we proved everything we had to prove. And especially last year, winning six races. So I think it was the right time to make that jump. Our McColl chassis car has been really really solid. We don’t have that many notes when we come to racetracks like this, and our car is really good right off the bat. It was the right timing. Larue never ran the full [American] series, they’ve always wanted to do it. So I think I’m at my best right now, they’re at their best. It was perfect timing.”
The Canadian team and driver are also at their best with a Canadian chassis, sourcing their cars from McColl Racing Chassis in London, Ont., far from the current hotbed for ACT-style Late Model racing.
“I used to run the Port City,” he said. “Two years, my first championship in ACT Quebec was with a Port City. And we sold our Port City race car and bought two McColl, for me and William [Larue]. So last year I ran the McColl, and now I’m running a McColl here also. It’s from Ontario. They’ve been really, really good, a really solid car, and it’s fun to come out here and win with something different than a Dale Shaw Race Car or a Distance.”
William Larue, Lessard’s teammate, capped off a big night for the team close to home, winning the NASCAR Canada Series Bud Light 250 at Autodrome Chaudière, Lessard’s home track.
Runner-up Shaw has been working through a rebuilding year of his own. After four years racing for Vermont car owner and Dale Shaw Race Cars customer Arnie Hill, Shaw opted to field his own ACT program in 2025. Shaw’s wife Mallory is the owner of record on the No. 60. While the Shaw family has run their own PASS championship program for years, this is Shaw’s first season overseeing the team finances as they expand to a double effort.
The move, Shaw explains, is largely about development of the chassis that has won so many ACT features over the last few year.
“We’re more hands-on,” he said. “Still just kind of…it was more for the ability to try things more often than anything, and having the car close. And try things, and try to get better. And a lot of times you’re gonna get worse when you do that. Montmagny was not a good day for us to be exploring. We changed more than I’ve ever changed at the race track there, and just never hit anything. There’s pros and cons to everything you do, and you just gotta build a notebook and try to be better next time.”
With a worst finish of 11th in 2025 and three top-four runs in their last four races, Shaw’s team is turning the corner.
“I feel like we’re closing on it now,” he said. “We’ve got a couple fourths and a couple seconds. Just doesn’t take much more luck than what we had tonight to be the winner. So we’ve just got to be in contention to capitalize on those, if we’re not the fastest car, and hopefully we can just make it the fastest car here one of these days.”
Fortunately for Shaw and his peers, not too many long-distance races remain in the second half of the Milton CAT American-Canadian Tour season. It is those races, Lessard says, where he excels.
“I love long races,” he said. “I’ve run the RedBud 400, the Winchester 400, the All-American 400 in Super Lates. So I love these races, because everyone gets tired at the end. And I don’t. I try to be in good shape, try to stay hydrated all week and work out, and I try to be focused, to be in good shape for the end of races like this, to be on my game. And I think the longer the race is, the better I am.
“I love those races.”
Unofficial Results
Milton CAT American-Canadian Tour | Milton CAT Midsummer Classic 250
White Mountain Motorsports Park, North Woodstock, N.H.
1. (48QC) Raphaël Lessard
2. (60BH) D.J. Shaw
3. (03MA) Derek Gluchacki
4. (36NH) Erick Sands
5. (88VT) Nick Sweet
6. (00NH) Jimmy Renfrew, Jr.
7. (4NH) Jamie Swallow, Jr.
8. (45NH) Kasey Beattie
9. (72MA) Ryan Kuhn
10. (97NH) Joey Polewarczyk
11. (18VT) Kaiden Fisher
12. (25NH) Jesse Switser
13. (41QC) Jonathan Bouvrette
14. (46VT) Brian Hoar
15. (31CT) Alexendre Tardif
16. (53NH) Jeremy Davis
17. (10NH) Bryan Mason
18. (27MA) Chase Curtis
19. (47MA) Justin Storace
20. (04NH) Shawn Swallow
21. (73MA) Cole Littlewood
22. (64VT) Christopher Pelkey
23. (58VT) Jimmy Hebert
24. (33QC) Rémi Perreault
25. (04VT) Justin Prescott
26. (68NH) Tanner Woodard
27. (5MA) Tom Carey III
28. (47NH) Gabe Brown
29. (0VT) Scott Dragon
30. (77AZ) Brandon Lambert
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