Erick Sands has come so close to victory on the American-Canadian Tour so many times over the last few years, but with nothing to show for it.
In Saturday’s season-ending Haunted Hundred, Sands finally exorcised the ghosts of his near-misses.
The fourth-year series regular conquered Seekonk Speedway to end the season with his first-ever ACT Tour win, one of four drivers to earn their first Tour victory in 2024.
“To me, it’s absolutely amazing,” Sands said moments after his frontstretch celebration. “Just for myself to be able to compete at this level.”
After a year at New London-Waterford Speedbowl, the Haunted Hundred tradition returned home to the “Cement Palace” for an exceptionally-rare November race date. And while the championship battle between Gabe Brown and D.J. Shaw was all but settled, the thirteenth race of a season that started in mid-April was very much up for grabs.
Enter Sands, the Seabrook, N.H. racer who finished second at Seekonk in June’s Spring Green. Sixth in the standings and out of the championship battle, Sands had two other top-five finishes to his name in 2024, a runner-up at Oxford Plains Speedway in August and a third-place finish at Thunder Road International Speedbowl in September. All that remained was to find the elusive first win.
Facing a 37-car entry list that promised to send at least six teams home early, Sands dominated the fourth and final heat, securing a solid position in the field. Rookie Jeremy Sorel’s consi win gridded him second, alongside Seekonk Pro Stock all-star David Darling.
But Sorel faltered at the drop of the green, drifting wide as Darling eased ahead with the lead. Sands charged to second, only needing a few laps to pressure Darling at the point. Darling slipped to second as Sands overpowered the eight-time track champion.
While the drop of the green flag had officially locked up Brown’s pursuit of the ACT Tour crown, the three-race Brookside Equipment Sales Southern New England Triple Crown was still in play. Triple Crown points leader Tom Carey III received his first scare on lap 12, as Craig Weinstein cut across his nose and spun in turn two. Sands’ early lead was negated as Darling and fellow Seekonk Pro Stock competitor Dylan Estrella lined up for the restart.
Sands only needed a couple laps to shake Darling, who soon had his hands full with Joshua Hedges as they scrapped for second.
Meanwhile, Polewarczyk quietly climbed into the top five as Shaw and Brown cracked the top ten. When Rémi Perreault looped his car off turn two on lap 41, the yellow froze the field with “Joey Pole” up to third.
Polewarczyk worked around Darling for second on the restart as fifth-place Bryan Wall, Jr. was shuffled up the track and out of the pack. Carey, the Triple Crown leader, was knocking on the door of the top five when Spring Green winner Kasey Beattie got into him, sending Carey for a spin and to the back of the field. The caution flag came back out on lap 46, with officials sending Beattie to the tail for the contact.
Sorel’s early-race troubles resurfaced as he dropped to the tail on the restart, while Sands continued to set the pace out front. Frantic racing deeper in the pack sent Ryan Flood for a spin in turn four, and Flood came to a stop in the middle of the track, directly in Carey’s path. Carey limped to the pits with heavy front-end damage, and though he would make it back in time for the green flag, his Triple Crown hopes were dashed.
The restart came on lap 53, and Sands and Polewarczyk quickly distanced themselves from the battle for third. Darling clung to the podium position as Brown and Shaw dueled for fourth and fifth, all with Jesse Switser close at hand. As Brown looked under Darling for third, Switser poked his nose in down the backstretch, turning Brown sideways. Brown gathered it back up in turn three, tagging Darling’s left rear and launching the local favorite into a violent spin that stopped hard against the turn-three concrete.
Darling exited the car under his own power, gesturing at Brown under caution. In the moment, officials sided with Darling, sending the newly-minted champion to the tail of the field for his role in the incident.
Sands, now also leading the Triple Crown standings, led the field to the green on lap 67. While Polewarczyk loomed large in his mirror, the 2014 ACT Tour titlist could not close the gap enough to mount a challenge. And the yellow flag that Polewarczyk needed, the same one that had cost Sands a sure victory at Oxford, never unfurled again.
Leading almost from wire to wire, Sands capped off his 2024 season with his first career ACT Tour win in his 53rd series start.
Sands credited father Jay for setting the pieces in motion to propel him to the winner’s circle.
“I’ve got to give it to my old man, because he really does put everything into this whole organization, and he doesn’t let me have anything that’s not the best,” the younger Sands said with pride. “He needs the credit, because I’m just the idiot behind the wheel.”
The father-and-son tandem has raced together for years, dabbling in touring racing with the Granite State Pro Stock Series in the early 2010s. The duo shifted their focus to ACT Late Models when Star Speedway introduced a weekly Late Model division, with Jay edging out Erick for the 2020 track championship.
The next year, the Sands family were all-in on Erick’s full-time ACT Tour entry. Including one-off appearances in 2018 and 2019, Sands earned top-ten finishes in four of his first five Tour starts. Reality ensued as the season progressed, with Sands waiting until that September to score another top ten.
“This series is absolutely no joke,” Sands said. “The competitors and the competitiveness of this series is second to none. It explains itself with the car count, and all the people and cars and everybody involved in this whole series.”
Popularity and competition, though, can have their side effects, as Sands realized firsthand in August. “Some of these races, I feel like I’ve lost because…” Sands paused. “It’s not a bad problem to have, but sometimes, the car count of the series…and when you start too many cars, it’s too many cautions, and I don’t think the race can play out as it should.
“But no one can control the outcome of a race, so it is what it is.”
Polewarczyk, unable to add to his career win total this year, finished a season-best second. A wreck in the season opener at New Hampshire Motor Speedway left the Tour veteran without his newest car all season, as they ran a part-time schedule the rest of the year.
Shaw and Switser ended the afternoon in third and fourth, while Tardif benefited from the midrace fireworks to come home fifth. Jimmy Renfrew, Jr., Gluchacki, early frontrunner Hedges, Cam Huntress and Ryan Kuhn rounded out the top ten.
Beattie finished 11th after his penalty, earning Rookie of the Year honors over Kaiden Fisher, Sorel and Cole Littlewood.
Gluchacki, who won at New Hampshire Motor Speedway by disqualification and nudged past Sands to win at Oxford, was the only driver to win more than once on the 13-race schedule. Of the twelve different feature winners, four – Christopher Pelkey at Thunder Road, Tardif at Autodrome Chaudiere, Beattie at Seekonk, and now Sands – were first-time winners on the Tour.
Sands, who unofficially claimed the $2,000 Brookside Equipment Sales Southern New England Triple Crown bonus as well, finds the ACT Tour to be a preferable option to the weekly grind.
“Weekly racing for us is just too much, as to getting to the track every week,” Sands said. “But the thirteen races on the Tour, it really splits up my time with my family. Both of my kids are racing now, too. So it makes it a little bit easier on us.”
Brown, penalized for his lap-67 contact with Darling, finished 16th. It was one of only three finishes worse than sixth all year. And with his heat race finish earlier in the afternoon, it was more than enough to clinch the ACT Tour title for the 22-year-old from Center Conway, N.H., who lit up the track with a smokeshow en route to the winner’s circle.
Last year, Brown entered the season finale as the points leader. A pre-race go-karting outing landed Brown in the hospital the night before the finale, and while the injury was minor, it derailed Brown’s title hopes, handing the championship to Shaw.
Brown joked about the incident on Facebook shortly before the race. But despite the lighthearted approach, last year’s loss weighed heavily on him.
“We threw one away last year pretty hard, and it’s still hard to swallow, even after winning one,” he said. “We’re going to come back next year and hopefully do it again, because I know I’ve got the team to do it, I know I’ve got the car to do it, and we’re plenty capable of doing it.”
Much as his mentor and “corporate” teammate Shaw did in the Pro All Stars Series this year, Brown set the bar high with consistency, something he credited to a loyal team.
“The biggest thing is having a car that doesn’t fall apart,” Brown said. “And Matt Morrill has done that all year for me. He maintains it, he sets it up – we set it up together, but he does all the maintenance, and I wouldn’t be able to do this without him. He does all the weekly work and I’m pretty grateful to have guys like him and Donnie, Dave, just all my guys that make this happen and the ones that come and help during the week. It’s not easy to do when we’re running most of the PASS races and all the ACT races, and we fill it in with some weekly races whenever we can. It’s a lot of work and my guys make it possible.”
And it took effort from the driver, a driver who openly embraces his aggressive reputation, to race with composure all season long.
“Obviously if we didn’t wreck out of Loudon and get a minimum points day there, this wouldn’t have even been close,” he said. “We had one bad race at Thunder Road this year, we finished [16th], and we finished 16th here today. We were running third here. It’s just, we put together a really solid year. I think we top-three’d like six or seven times. These guys worked really hard, and I have bitched and complained all weekend about how bad this race car was, and they went to work and kept going to work. And I wasn’t happy until, really, the feature time. I knew we were in the right direction in the heat race, but when we took the green in the feature, I knew that we had a really good race car.
“Unfortunately, we just don’t have the results to show for it.”
Notably, race director Scott Tapley sought out Brown after the race to apologize for the penalty call, an act of contrition he reiterated on Facebook Sunday morning.
“Congratulations Gabe and apologies again for the 100% bad call by me yesterday,” Tapley replied in a comment to Brown’s own Facebook post. “I’ll be beating myself up for that one for a while after seeing the replay.”
Fortunately, the real impact of the penalty was merely statistical. Brown ended the season with a 37-point margin over Shaw, the two-time defending ACT Tour champion. While both drivers race Dale Shaw Race Cars chassis and Brown works full-time at the Shaw shop, Brown races for his family team and Shaw’s cars are fielded by Vermont-based car owner Arnie Hill. Shaw-built cars combined to win over half of the season’s races.
No matter the owner, the title is an honor for those who fabricate them.
“This is just big overall for Dale Shaw Race Cars,” Brown said. “We’ve worked so hard for this. We work closely together. They might not use what I use with my ACT car, but maybe at some point they will, when they realize it’s better.”
Brown’s stock car career started at Oxford Plains Speedway, where he captured the track’s Super Late Model championship as a rookie. In 2021, he earned his first touring title with the Granite State Pro Stock Series. While the series is regarded as a step below PASS, Brown feels that the talent elevated his time there.
“Winning the Granite State championship was awesome,” he said. “All the races we won with Granite State were against good people. When we won the $10,000-to-win race at Claremont, it was against good competition: Eddie [MacDonald], Joey Pole, Derek Griffith, Joey Doiron. When we went to Lee, same thing, all those same guys at Lee. When we should have won Star, and the right front went down, it was all those same guys. We didn’t win the races we should have…we won the ones that mattered.”
But the ACT Tour title, earned against a stout base of regular competitors and at-large weekly racers at tracks like Thunder Road and White Mountain Motorsports Park, has a different gravity.
And the ACT Tour championship comes with decades of history, history Brown does not take lightly.
“This is huge, because we had ultimately the most consistent, best car all year long,” said Brown. “We were a threat to win every week, except for any race at Thunder Road, and we were in position to win one at Thunder Road! So it’s pretty special to win this, and to look back at all the champions that have won this. I’m really grateful to bring the ACT championship back to Conway again.”
And again and again, if Brown has his way.
“Just cool to have that championship come back to Center Conway for three years in a row, no matter who it is,” Brown said, his confidence on full display. “Last year it should have been me, but it wasn’t, and it still came back to Conway, so hopefully we can do that again next year.
“And I think we’re plenty capable to do that.”
Unofficial Results
ACT Late Model Tour | Haunted Hundred
Seekonk Speedway, Seekonk, Mass.
1. (36NH) Erick Sands
2. (97NH) Joey Polewarczyk
3. (04VT) D.J. Shaw
4. (25NH) Jesse Switser
5. (21QC) Alexendre Tardif
6. (0NH) Jimmy Renfrew, Jr.
7. (03MA) Derek Gluchacki
8. (29MA) Joshua Hedges
9. (27NH) Cam Huntress
10. (72MA) Ryan Kuhn
11. (45NH) Kasey Beattie
12. (18VT) Kaiden Fisher
13. (77NH) Bryan Wall, Jr.
14. (30RI) Jacob “Rowdy” Burns
15. (7MA) Jeremy Sorel
16. (47NH) Gabe Brown
17. (35MA) Dylan Estrella
18. (08RI) Richie Murray
19. (90MA) Craig Weinstein
20. (38RI) Connor Souza
21. (12RI) Bobby Pelland III
22. (42NH) Mike Jurkowski
23. (98MA) Ryan Flood
24. (73MA) Cole Littlewood
25. (64RI) Devin Deshaies
26. (33QC) Rémi Perreault
27. (41QC) Jonathan Bouvrette
28. (55MA) Randy Cole
29. (52MA) David Darling
30. (5MA) Tom Carey III
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