Bowman Gray Stadium Crowns 2025 Champions

Bowman Gray Stadium has crowned its champions for the 2025 season.

While Time Brown led all 150 laps in the Farm Credit 150 to earn his 105th Bowman Gray Modified win, Brandon Ward finished in sixth, clinching the championship for the Modified division this year, his second at the historic track.

“It’s always a long season over here,” Ward said after the race. “It’s week after week. It’s a grueling schedule. It seems kind of fast when you really think about it because it’s every single weekend back-to-back pretty much except for July 4th. So then we’re always racing somewhere on a Tour race on the 4th. You don’t really get a break through the summer. So when you get to this point, you’re pretty much glad it’s over with.”

Throughout the season at The Madhouse, Ward said this is the first time this year he was focused on the points going into a race.

“Tonight’s the first race I really came into 100% looking at the points,” Ward said. “We knew we had to be top 14 to lock it up. We were trying to stay out of trouble. That’s hard to do here. Sometimes when you’re trying to stay out of trouble, you’ll put yourself in a position [that] gets you in trouble. 

“We were good in practice. We put our qualifying tires on, and it’s the first time all year long I really feel like we haven’t got going good on that set of tires. So in the race tonight, the car, it wasn’t bad. It just didn’t sit down. And we’re trying to be careful. We’re trying to not beat ourselves. We had to race a race within the race.”

With Brown’s win tonight, he retains his record of having the most wins in the Modified division at the track, pushing him to two more wins than Burt Myers, his closest competition. Brown had to fend off Myers in a two-lap shootout, and despite some contact from Myers in Turns 3 and 4, Brown held on to earn the win.

After thanking his sponsors and team members, Brown had one simple comment in victory lane: “Congratulations to Brandon Ward and that team out there. They deserve the championship but we’ll be out there next year.”

Sportsman Champion Crowned, DQs Persist

Chase Robertson claimed his second Sportsman division championship at Bowman Gray in three years with a ninth place finish. The 2023 champion finished runner-up in the points last year, but he walks away the champion again in 2025.

“It’s been a heck of a year,” Robertson said. “Two championships in three years. Nothing to hang our heads about. I just knew if I finished seventh or better, I really had it. So we just went in seventh and kind of rode there.”

Zack Ore crossed the finish line first in 40-lap Sportsman, but was disqualified, giving the win to Tommy Neal. The last several weekends at Bowman Gray have seen drivers, or multiple drivers, in the Sportsman division disqualified for various reasons, and not even the championship race was safe from the drama. This time, the officials believe that the motor Ore won with was not the motor that they inspected in the morning.

“This morning, he’s supposed to have been here with his car, the motor in his car, an oil fan off his car,” Neal said, “They were supposed to take his rods and crank and all that stuff, so I don’t know what happened. He tried to do some kind of switcheroo game with some motors or something. I don’t know what he did. I really don’t care. It ain’t none of my business.

“Everything was legal about my car. So if it’s what Bowman Gray wants every week, I commend them about it. Everybody can either abide by the rules and play the right game or stay home. That’s the way I look at it.”

The recent wave of Sportsman disqualifications started on July 26 when the top four finishers all were asked to drop their oil pans, and all four were disqualified. Race winner Zack Clifton refused to drop his oil pan. Robertson finished second, and while his motor was deemed legal, he was disqualified for a tire infraction. Sterling Plemmons finished third and refused to drop his oil pan, and Ore finished fourth but refused technical inspection.

Fifth place finisher Justin Taylor had to leave the track in an ambulance due to heat exhaustion, and due to that, the team did not have to have their car inspected, giving him the win.

The twin races on August 9 saw Ore and Amber Lynn take home the wins, but both were disqualified for refusing tech, giving Neal and Mitch Gale the wins.

On August 16, Lynn and Ore won again. Lynn again refused tech, resulting in a disqualification, and Ore did not drop the oil pan in time, resulting in him getting disqualified as well. Plemmons and Robertson won those races as a result.

With the new crackdown on tech inspection at the track for the series, only time will tell if this is a trend that will continue into the 2026 season, or if it will return to somewhat of a normalcy.