For half of Saturday’s Pro All Stars Series feature at the Northeast Classic, Eddie MacDonald looked to be well on the way to a New Hampshire Motor Speedway three-peat.
But Derek Griffith had something to say about that after the mid-race break.
Griffith outgunned “The Outlaw” on the day’s only restart, then stretched his advantage en route to his 17th PASS North Super Late Model win and his first-ever victory at the “Magic Mile.”
At a track that has long served as a launching pad to stardom for New England’s best racers, it was a long-overdue milestone.
“I feel like this place has owed us one,” Griffith said. “We’ve been good here so many times and it just hasn’t been our day.”
Saturday’s event, headlined by the second race of the PASS North calendar and the Milton CAT American-Canadian Tour season opener, was delayed a week when weather forecasts warned of a complete washout for the original date. However, the postponement may have been a boon to both MacDonald and Griffith, who met with misfortune and concrete in separate late-race incidents in PASS’ Icebreaker 75 at Thompson Speedway.
The one-week reprieve gave both drivers, as well as seven-time champion Johnny Clark, an opportunity to rebuild their wrecked cars for the fastest track on the schedule.
In qualifying, though, it appeared that Griffith’s team’s efforts had fallen short. MacDonald’s heat win placed him outside Ryan Kuhn on the starting grid. Clark, second to Kuhn in the first heat, would roll off third. Griffith was mired deep in the 18-car field.
As MacDonald powered to the lead in the opening circuits, Griffith diced his way through traffic. With halfway approaching, Griffith took advantage of contact between D.J. Shaw and Bobby Therrien to slip into the top five. When the yellow flew to signify halfway, the Hudson, N.H. phenom had cleared Kuhn for second.
Following a trip to the infield for adjustments, MacDonald lined up alongside Griffith for the restart with 24 laps to go. But where most expected a repeat of the initial start, Griffith held his own with MacDonald, then overpowered the Massachusetts veteran to take the point. As the field strung out under green, MacDonald slipped back, unable to challenge for the lead. Clark, who had run in the top five all afternoon, stalked MacDonald from third.
Light rain forced officials to wave the yellow flag on the final lap of the race, securing Griffith’s first win of 2025 and his first top-five finish at NHMS since 2019.
Griffith’s first win since the PASS Fall Foliage 150 last September also bookended a challenging personal stretch for the 28-year-old racer. Following the win, Griffith quietly withdrew from racing to tend to an undisclosed health concern. He returned to the cockpit at New Smyrna Speedway in February. But with wife Emily and his team looking on, Griffith unveiled another off-track challenge for the young family.
“Really good news, me and my wife are expecting, we’re having a boy,” he said. “We had some really bad news and we didn’t know if he was going to make it. We got news this week that he was going to make it.
“It was a long week.”
MacDonald, who won PASS’ first appearance at NHMS in 2015, held off a last-ditch charge by Clark to finish second. A victory Saturday would have been MacDonald’s 14th win at NHMS across multiple divisions. Clark, the inaugural Northeast Classic winner in 2021, rebounded from a practice crash at Thompson Speedway to post his first podium finish of 2025.
ACT standout Alexendre “Fireball” Tardif waged a mid-race battle with defending champion Shaw before finishing fourth. Polesitter Kuhn, the 2022 PASS North champion, rounded out the top five.
Brandon Barker drove to a sixth-place finish, one position ahead of Shaw. PASS veteran Ben Rowe ran in the front before fading to eighth. Rookie Brandon Varney was ninth in his NHMS debut. Thompson winner Trevor Sanborn, who was swept up in a violent crash last year, paced himself in the first half but could only climb to tenth by the fall of the checkered flag.
Eighteen cars started the feature, with Vermont’s Jimmy Hebert parking his ailing car before the main event. NASCAR spotter Derek Kneeland took the green after losing an engine in Friday’s practice sessions, but further mechanical gremlins ended his afternoon shortly past halfway.
With Saturday’s win, Griffith has at least one victory at six of New Hampshire’s eight active paved ovals. The two tracks where he remains winless are Monadnock Speedway, where he has not raced since 2015, and Riverside Speedway, where his last start was in 2018. Neither track has been on PASS’ schedule in several years.
Griffith’s victory carries a sense of redemption for his misfortune in the 2022 Northeast Classic. Nursing body damage from an early incident in his heat, Griffith was trying to avoid further issues when a rookie overshot the first turn. Griffith was collected, slamming the concrete and barrel-rolling before skidding to a stop. He was unhurt, but the team’s car was dealt terminal damage only a few weeks into the year.
That 2022 season saw Griffith’s LCM Motorsports team struggle through uncharacteristic wrecks, but also afforded the young racer a handful of starts in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, where his potential at the wheel opened eyes but not wallets.
Focused solely on Super Late Model competition, Griffith and crew chief Louie Mechalides are back to their old routine: running as many Super Late Model and Pro Stock events across New England as they can, while saving some cash for the occasional road trip to prove themselves against the nation’s top racers at events like the Snowball Derby.
And as they reminded on Saturday, that routine involves winning.
Unofficial Results
PASS North | Northeast Classic 50
New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Loudon, N.H.
1. (12G) Derek Griffith
2. (17MA) Eddie MacDonald
3. (54) Johnny Clark
4. (21QC) Alexendre Tardif
5. (72) Ryan Kuhn
6. (88) Brandon Barker
7. (60) D.J. Shaw
8. (5) Ben Rowe
9. (12V) Brandon Varney
10. (44) Trevor Sanborn
11. (12S) Dennis Spencer, Jr.
12. (7) Jeremy Sorel
13. (18) Michael Scorzelli
14. (5X) Bobby Therrien
15. (01) Jett Decker
16. (18L) Justin Larsen
17. (24J) J.P. Josiasse
18. (90) Derek Kneeland
DNS (58VT) Jimmy Hebert
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