Lessard’s career comes full-circle with ACT championship

Four years ago, Raphaël Lessard was headed home to Quebec, his national motorsports dreams derailed by a lack of sponsorship.

But unlike many drivers in similar circumstances, Lessard found a path back to glory.

Last Saturday afternoon at Seekonk Speedway, the young Canadian clinched the Milton CAT American-Canadian Tour championship, his third title in three years but his first on American soil in almost a decade.

“Coming down here, it’s not our home,” said Lessard, ACT’s first Canadian champion in seventeen years. “It’s not easy.”

Lessard’s championship is a full-circle journey for the 24-year-old from St.-Joseph-de-Beauce, Que., a journey that accelerated through short track racing’s development channels and peaked in NASCAR’s national ranks, ultimately yielding redemption through his home province’s top level of competition.

And yet his journey has barely begun.

Lessard first emerged on the American scene in 2015, a teenaged rookie competing in the Pro All Stars Series. While Lessard was still too young to race at one track on the schedule, the youngster was credited with 15 starts that year, scoring top-ten finishes at Autodrome Chaudière and Autodrome Montmagny.

Under the guidance of Toyota and David Gilliland Racing, Lessard was spirited away to the Southeast, winning races and the 2016 CARS Super Late Model Tour championship. He returned to the Northeast that summer, racing for DGR in the short-lived U.S. Pro Stock/Super Late Model Nationals at Seekonk.

He finished a forgettable 16th, bowing out shortly after halfway.

“We didn’t have fun down here!” he recalled. “The guys in the South are not very used to race tracks that round. So when we got here, I was getting lapped a ton in that race.”

His Super Late Model success earned him spot starts in ARCA, then a move to Kyle Busch Motorsports. A full-time NASCAR Truck Series ride followed in 2020; Lessard missed the playoffs but won his first race that fall and finished 12th in points.

The following year, Quebec’s strict COVID restrictions led Lessard’s Canadian backers to trim their budgets. Seven races into the season, fresh off an eighth-place finish, Lessard lost his ride.

But as one door closed, another opened.

Enter Larue Motorsport, a mainstay team of Quebec’s Late Model Sportsman ecosystem. Car owners Denis and Louis Larue, whose family company manufactures industrial snow-clearing equipment, has fielded entries for years in ACT and with ACT’s Quebec sanctioning partners. André Beaudoin, Karl Allard and Alex Labbé were among the team’s past drivers, with Allard and Labbe winning Série ACT titles in 2010 and 2014. The Larues continued to support Labbé in his NASCAR Xfinity Series efforts with Quebec expatriate Mario Gosselin.

Taking the wheel of the Larues’ familiar No. 48, Lessard won the Tom Curley 250 at Montmagny, then reeled off two NASCAR Pinty’s Series wins for former ACT racer Donald Theetge. In 2022, Lessard supplemented a partial Pinty’s Series effort with wins in the ACT Tour CAN-AM 200 and Chaudière’s Bacon Bowl 200.

ACT’s Late Model platform had long been the province’s top echelon of short-track competition, with a sanctioning partner promoting the Série ACT until the relationship dissolved in 2017. For 2023, a new partnership revived the Série ACT brand with a schedule split between Chaudière and Montmagny.

Lessard and Larue Motorsport dominated the new Serie ACT LMS, winning back-to-back championships and scoring eight feature wins. Two of those wins came in events co-sanctioned with the U.S.-based Tour, giving Lessard his first ACT Tour victories.

Lessard and the Larues craved a new challenge for 2025. With the Larues expanding their business into Vermont, and with Milton CAT infusing big money into the already-stout ACT championship fund, the time was right.

However, many of the New England tracks they would face were relative unknowns. 

“Every time I’ve won a championship – like down south, the CARS Tour championship, when I won with David Gilliland – my team knew the race tracks,” Lessard said. “I didn’t know the race tracks, but my team knew about the setups, had some good notes about these tracks. This same thing last year, with ACT Quebec. But this year it was all up in the air for us.”

At best, Lessard had last raced them when he was barely fourteen, racing a Super Late Model with wide tires compared to his current perimeter-frame ACT Late Model.

“We didn’t know,” he said. “We were showing up to the race track, and we were like, ‘I guess that’s the setup we’ll put on the car and I guess that will work?’

“That’s why I think this is the toughest one.”

Lessard finished eighth at New Hampshire Motor Speedway and sixth at Star Speedway. At Thunder Road International Speedbowl, where weekly racers regularly trounce the touring teams, Lessard led 90 laps and finished a strong third.

At White Mountain Motorsports Park, Lessard stole the lead from D.J. Shaw on a late restart to win his first Milton CAT American-Canadian Tour race on American soil – and his first win in the United States since his Truck Series victory in late 2020.

Lessard’s NHMS finish was his worst of the first eight races, a stretch including a dead heat with Jeff Côté in July’s CAN-AM 200 at Montmagny that took twenty minutes and a drone photo to confirm Côté as the winner, and a second win at WMMP in the Midsummer Classic 250.

That same August evening, teammate Will Larue piloted Larue Motorsport’s NASCAR Canada Series entry to victory at Chaudière, scoring his first NASCAR win against Donald Theetge, the car owner for Lessard’s first series wins back in 2021.

“It’s a lot of fun, but I couldn’t do it without my team, Larue Motorsport,” Lessard said. “They do a really good job and we work really well together. Yes, my car is good, but we finished every race. So I think that’s what makes a champion team. It’s our third championship together, we had two ACT Quebec Series championships, and now it’s our third year in a row winning a championship. It shows how good they are, even in the garage, mechanic-wise, and getting everything ready.”

How the driver and team faced adversity reflected that synergy. At Oxford Plains Speedway, a track where Lessard had not raced since 2015, he finished a season-worst 17th in a rescheduled-and-relocated Yvon Bedard 109. The next night, Lessard rebounded, carving up traffic and finishing second.

At Thunder Road’s Labor Day Classic a week later, Lessard won his heat race, but never made up ground from 13th on the grid. In a race where only three yellows slowed the 200-lap tilt, Lessard finished a lap down in 14th. Back at WMMP for the Fall Foliage 200, Lessard bounced back and finished second to defending champion Gabe Brown.

Thunder Road repeated on the season-ending schedule with the Vermont Milk Bowl, a non-points race where attendance is mandatory for Tour full-timers. Lessard led laps and was scored fifth overall in the final rundown, by far his best effort in his third attempt at the legendary 150-lap, three-segment brawl.

In the penultimate race of the season at Oxford, Lessard finished fourth behind Brown, who reeled off three wins in five races to overcome a big deficit in the points. Brown had clawed his way back with one race remaining, with two other drivers mathematically in contention.

“There were still maybe four cars that could have won the championship this year,” Lessard said of the season finale. “The last few championships I’ve won, I would get to the last race of the season and only have to start the race. So there was a little bit more pressure, for sure, this year.”

That last race was at Seekonk, the track that stymied Lessard so in 2016. A fourth-place finish in June’s Spring Green suggested those struggles were in the past.

Qualifying for the Milton CAT Haunted Hundred suggested otherwise. Brown and title longshot Jesse Switser won their heats. Lessard and two-time champ Shaw rolled off deep in the field. As fate would have it, the “Action Track of the East” gave way to a green-flag sprint that clocked in just over 23 minutes from start to finish, giving Lessard and Shaw precious little time to get through traffic.

While a walk-off win was never within grasp, Lessard did everything he needed to, passing Brown in the final laps to finish 11th.

With his two closest points rivals in his mirror, it was more than enough to clinch the crown.

In his first full season on the Milton CAT American-Canadian Tour, his first full season of racing in the United States since 2020, his first full short-track season in the Northeast in a decade, Lessard had come away with one of the region’s most competitive championships, worth a cool $20,000 in the first year of ACT’s deal with heavy equipment dealer Milton CAT. Ten different drivers scored feature wins in 2025. Only Lessard and Brown scored multiple wins.

“It’s my first championship that I’ve won that the average car count was almost 34 cars per race,” Lessard said.

Not only did the U.S. Tour present a competitive driver base, it also offered a far more diverse schedule, with eight different tracks hosting ACT events compared to the two ovals that share the Série ACT itinerary.

“I think it got our team even better, way better this year,” he said, “than running the same race track every weekend like Chaudière and Montmagny. Now we have some notes, some different setups, some different race tracks. I think we got ourselves a lot better.”

Lessard’s title ended a three-year streak for chassis fabricated by Dale Shaw Race Cars. Larue Motorsport switched to cars sourced from Ontario-based chassis shop McColl Racing Enterprises in 2024, giving them a blank slate at many tracks on the United States schedule.

“It feels even better to win with something other than what everybody else has been running,” said Lessard. “Like, the Dale Shaw cars are super good here, and I think running with a McColl…I’ve always loved these cars, but we didn’t have any notes coming into the season here, and we’re going to places we’ve never been with the car. And I think it proves, and it shows, how good the McColl chassis have been to us.

“Maybe some Americans are gonna make some phone calls to Mike McColl!”

Lessard is the fourth Canadian to win the ACT championship in a history that dates back to 1979, when founders Tom Curley and Ken Squier organized the so-called NASCAR North circuit that was rechristened under the ACT moniker for 1986. Russ Urlin won the 1989 ACT Tour championship, while Junior Hanley scored a three-peat from 1991 through 1993. The two Ontarians’ titles were earned in ACT’s Pro Stock era, a far different time for cross-border participation in regional auto racing.

Travel to and from Canada is a far different story in 2025, though Lessard shrugged off the modern complexities of hauling across the border a dozen times a year.

“Honestly, sometimes it’s harder to go back to Canada,” he said. “Because they’re like, ‘What are you doing? Did you buy anything?’ I felt like you guys are a lot more welcoming when we come to the U.S. There’s a lot more U.S. NASCAR fans, and stock car fans … for us, it’s mostly hockey. So every time we come across the border, to come in the United States, and we say we’re going racing, they’re like, all right, come on in!” 

Patrick Laperle was the third Canadian and first Quebecer to earn the ACT Tour title, and the first to do so in the ACT Late Model era. The inaugural Serie ACT champion earned the 2008 Tour crown on the back of three wins, including the only Canadian race on the schedule that season.

Lessard was only seven years old then.

Lessard’s championships rank him among other nationally-recognized racers from Quebec’s sometimes rough-and-tumble short track scene, drivers like Laperle, Labbé, Theetge, Jean-Paul Cabana, and Claude Leclerc. It also makes him an ambassador of sorts for the current crop of Quebec rising stars, like reigning Serie ACT champion Jeff Côté and ACT/PASS double threat Alexendre “Fireball” Tardif.

The significance is not lost on Lessard.

“It feels amazing to put my name on that list, for sure,” he said. “I grew up watching ACT, coming to Autodrome Chaudière, Montmagny and Ste-Croix. The [2010] Can-Am 200 was at Ste-Croix and I remember watching Brian Hoar and Patrick Laperle and Karl Allard in that [Larue] 48, and I remember how good these guys are and were.

“It’s just amazing, if I would have gone back to my eight-years-old self, watching these guys, I would have never thought I would be winning the championship.”

Lessard’s success the last three seasons is the career reprieve many national-level prospects never enjoy when their initial opportunity fades out. Lessard turned 24 in July. There is plenty of time for him to find another opportunity on the big stage.

Given the right opportunity—and, given his experience, it would have to be a good one—would he take it?

“I love racing race cars,” Lessard said. “As long as I can race in a competitive car, a competitive team, with a competitive series, and win and have fun and get better, I’m happy. But if the right opportunity would come in the future, to race maybe Trucks again, I’d for sure take it. But I’m just trying to show my talent every time I go out on the race track, every year. And maybe somebody was watching today that might give me a phone call. You never know.”

“I still talk to some people down south, some teams. But it’s always costing a lot of money. So hopefully, maybe, at some point I’ll receive a call. ‘Don’t worry about the money, we got you a ride.’ That would be why I would do it.

“But everybody hopes for that.”

If not, Lessard has the best regional opportunity in hand: a top-flight team on both sides of the border, a competitive series to race in, sponsorship to make it possible, and now a notebook with which to plan for 2026.

“I’m just super thankful for everything I’m doing right now,” he said.

He laughed. “It’s been fun. I love it here in the U.S., and especially running that series.”

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