After busy year off-track, Derek Griffith still finding success on-track

Derek Griffith climbed from his race car after the Pro All Stars Series Chummy Brown Memorial 144. Nearly an hour before, Griffith and his team had celebrated a photo-finish victory. Now, after post-race tech, the actual outcome was still being deliberated.

Despite the uncertainty, Griffith was all smiles, shaking hands with his team, with his competitors, with friends in the pit area.

And even after the race result was reversed in favor of Joey Doiron, Griffith was positive, professional, and poised to move on.

From the outside, it has been a quiet season for the Hudson, N.H. racer who has been northern New England’s ambassador of sorts in national short track racing. Griffith was in Florida for New Smyrna Speedway’s World Series in February, but he was absent at the Snowball Derby last December, and the usual mid-summer special shows at Berlin and Jennerstown.

On the home front, though, Griffith’s year has been anything but quiet.

“It’s been a lot, honestly,” he says.

Fans closer to home have seen more of Griffith than the national audience. Griffith opened the year with a crash at Thompson Speedway and a PASS win at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. He made starts in Oxford Plains Speedway’s marquée events, finishing eighth in the Celebration of America 300 and getting caught up in trouble late in the Oxford 250.

But the runner-up finish at Star Speedway was only Griffith’s third points-paying PASS race of 2025, his twelfth start of the year. Five of those were back in February.

“There’s been a lot going on,” Griffith summarizes. “We got a new car, and we’re getting that all sorted. I’m a dad, and we had some complications with Emily and her pregnancy. And then I’ve got my own health complications that have been kicking my butt for like two years now, or a year and a half. And just finally getting to a spot where I’m feeling good, I’m back to work, I’m doing stuff.”

Griffith skipped last year’s Snowball Derby, his first in several years, to focus on a health scare that sidelined him late in the year. He returned to action in February at New Smyrna, making his first starts since a PASS win at White Mountain Motorsports Park in September.

What has ailed the young racer remains unclear. “They’ve got ideas, but I’m just on a really good treatment plan right now,” he says. “And that’s been the savior. That’s been great. I feel good now, I’m doing better. I’m happy about that.”

Then came April’s announcement in NHMS’ victory lane that he and wife Emily were expecting their first child, having dodged pregnancy challenges only a week or two before. Daxton, the Griffiths’ son, was born in August, just in time for the family to head to the Oxford 250.

There’s also work. The entrepreneurial Griffith owns Northeast Auto Imports, a dealer of collector cars with a heavy focus on Japanese domestic market imports. Griffith has also expanded into climate-controlled automotive storage and powersports sales.

His wife has her own business interests as well. Emily’s brother, retired short-tracker Reid Lanpher, has been aggressively growing the family’s Maine-based trailer and equipment enterprise, expanding into properties a short distance from NHMS.

“Work’s been busy,” Griffith says. “I’ve got some awesome guys who work for me and they’ve been fantastic. It’s been one of those things that…it’s just been a weird year for sure.”

Griffith’s schedule has not left much time for racing. But as autumn ambles on, Griffith and his team have been making a bit more room on an itinerary that simply goes race by race.

He credits his team’s performance to his crew chief, former driver Louie Mechalides. Louie turns the wrenches; through LCM Racing Engines, he also provides powerplants for PASS’ “Bottlecap Crate” engine program. Louie’s sister Dolly has been Griffith’s spotter for years. The team is a collaborative effort between Griffith, his father John, and Mechalides, with all invested in the team’s ultimate success.

“Louie’s just…he’s such a resource, that I don’t think people realize I get access to,” he says. “I wouldn’t be anywhere without the Mechalides family.”

While the rest of the year’s schedule evolves, Griffith does have an eye on a return to the Snowball Derby. On a slimmer budget than most of his competitors, Griffith has performed well at the popular off-season show. He finished ninth in 2020, and came home a career-best seventh in his last start in 2023.

“I’d really love to race this car at the Snowball,” he says, motioning to the three-race-old Fury Race Cars chassis in his pit stall. “My new Fury car.”

Much of Griffith’s regional success over the last few years came in a car he acquired secondhand from Garrett Hall after losing a car to a punishing rollover at NHMS in early 2022. The newest car is presently configured for PASS’ rules package, which is far more akin to a Pro Late Model than the all-out SLMs raced at the Snowball Derby. There is another car in the shop that is set up for the big Super Late Model shows, but Griffith is increasingly enamored by the latest arrival.

“A lot of work to swap everything over and everything. I don’t know, man. This thing’s awesome.”

One might think that a single national-scale event is worth a certain number of local races, but Griffith shrugged off the notion.

“Yes and no,” he says. “I guess it just depends on where you go and how you do it. A trip to Jennerstown isn’t really much more expensive than a trip to Oxford for us. We’ve got to get hotels either way, we’ve gotta get all sorts of fuel. And rolling out to Berlin, yeah, it costs a little bit more money overall. But I don’t know, it’s just a different experience.”

And Griffith craves that diversity.

“I feel I do better,” he explains, “when I am a little bit more well-rounded with how I race tracks. Like, if I go to Berlin, and I go to Jennerstown, and I go to Orange County and Hickory, I feel like that helps me so much here, ‘cause you just feel things at other race tracks that you never feel at some of these. And man, you sometimes want to chase that feeling.

“So it helps me a lot, and it helps our program, and it’s fun. I don’t know if I’d ever be a weekly guy, man. I don’t have it in me to race the same place over and over and over again. I don’t want to do it. It’s just not my thing.”

Griffith’s talent and success earned him opportunities to test the national series waters, too. With support from Hudson Speedway owner Ben Bosowski and a couple outside sponsors, he made a handful of ARCA and NASCAR starts in the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But without funding, there have been no rides since 2022. Not even at NHMS, the track where Griffith won back in April, the track where NASCAR’s Craftsman Truck Series visited last week.

Instead, Griffith was hanging out at NHMS with the Prescott family, who sponsored Saturday’s Team EJP 175 and have supported countless New England racers, including Griffith’s brother-in-law Reid.

“I had some opportunities for Loudon [this year],” Griffith says. “But I felt like with everything going on with me, with Dax and Emily and everything, it just wasn’t in the cards to really put the resources into that. I want to be one hundred percent. Because if I’m not one hundred percent, there’s no way we can be one hundred percent. I had an opportunity, it just didn’t pan out. I probably would have still done it if it went a little bit more my way.

“But it’s just a lot of work, man. I don’t think people realize how much work goes into it when you’ve got to find this funding yourself. Like, it’s one thing if we had $2 or $3 million kicking around for fun. We want to go racing. And it’s great, good for those people who can.

“But I don’t.”

And that’s fine with Griffith, who spent Friday before the NASCAR weekend at Lee USA Speedway. A week after losing to Doiron by decision, he waxed Corey Bubar and Doiron to win a Granite State Pro Stock Series feature worth $10,000, his first win with the new chassis. Griffith made sure to tease Doiron as inspection wrapped up; the two discussed the lapped traffic that nearly cost Griffith the mid-race lead.

Griffith enjoys the competition, the camaraderie, the respect, and maybe most importantly, the accountability.

“When this thing fails, or when this thing has a problem, it’s my fault,” he says. “It’s not, ‘oh, this crew chief we hired two weeks ago,’ or ‘this guy,’ or ‘we fired the interior guy, and we did this.’ It’s like, no. I put this motor in, I put this rear in, we put the fuel line in, it’s our fault it’s breaking. So it just feels better. We have a lot more control.”

With control comes success. With success comes satisfaction.

And Griffith’s grin tells the whole story.

“This is fun.”

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