Late race skirmish clears way for Doiron’s PASS 400 win

Just a few weeks ago, Joey Doiron’s racing season appeared to be prematurely over.

But a broken foot couldn’t stop Doiron from scoring a walk-off victory.

The winner of July’s blockbuster Pro All Stars Series Celebration of America 300 held off a determined Travis Stearns by a fraction of a second in the final segment of the PASS North portion of Sunday’s season-ending PASS 400.

And the resulting third-place finish, combined with Doiron’s results in the first two segments, was enough to give him the overall win by one point over Max Cookson.

“I thought, going into the last segment, that Max had an insurmountable lead unless something happened,” the Berwick, Me. veteran said. “And unfortunately for him, fortunately for me, he got caught up in a wreck.”

The PASS 400 drew seasons to a close for both PASS and its home base, Oxford Plains Speedway, with a two-day program featuring Oxford’s weekly divisions on Saturday and the PASS Super Late Models and Modifieds on Sunday. The PASS North season finale, for a second year, was run in a format akin to Thunder Road’s Vermont Milk Bowl: three 100-lap segments comprised the full distance, with a 25-car finishing order invert to set the starting lineup for the second and third segments. The combined finishing positions from all three segments would determine the finishing order, with the lowest score deciding the winner.

Saturday’s program included qualifying rounds for the 400, with rookie Sylas Ripley, Austin Teras, and Steve Chicoine locking down heat race wins. The afternoon featured heartbreak as well; Oxford regulars Tim Brackett and Calvin Rose, Jr. scrambled to retrieve backup cars from home, and PASS points leader D.J. Shaw followed suit when his engine soured late in the day.

With Shaw relegated to last place and Ryan Robbins unable to get his car to the line, 35 cars gridded on the frontstretch for the opening segment, led to the green by Ripley and Teras.

Sixth-place starter Mike Rowe, however, failed to come up to speed, stacking up the high line into turn one with Scott Robbins and Michael Scorzelli taking the brunt of the incident. Rowe and Scorzelli were done for the segment, while Doiron pitted with battery and radio issues.

Teras, a three-time PASS feature winner a year ago, took off like a shot on the restart, gapping the field on a long green-flag run. Showing off the speed he flaunted in August’s PASS-sanctioned Super Late Model open, Teras carved through traffic effortlessly, leaving Ripley a quarter of a lap behind.

With the segment winding down, Teras had lapped Johnny Clark and Doiron, closing quickly on the back half of the top ten. But on lap 76, Teras pulled high and out of the pack, suddenly down on power. A broken driveshaft forced Teras pitside, ending a promising afternoon for the young Mainer.

Teras’ trouble unlapped Doiron and handed the lead to second-place Ripley, who took over with a safe advantage over Chicoine and Cookson. Cookson, racing in one of the cars he sold to Tom Abele, Jr. after last season’s championship run, ran down Chicoine in the closing laps, making the pass for second.

But Ripley’s lead was too great to whittle down. The 15-year-old rookie handily won the first segment, with Cookson, Travis Stearns, Chicoine and Cory Hall rounding out the top five. Doiron got around Kate Re and Shaw to take 11th at the finish.

Austin Theriault finished 25th, making him the polesitter of the race’s second segment. But Theriault struggled with suspension problems out of the gate, putting Scott Moore at the point as he pulled to the pits. Garrett Lamb drew alongside Moore, testing the outside line for a way around, but Moore eventually shook Lamb free and settled into a rhythm out front.

While Ripley and Chicoine struggled in traffic, Mike Hopkins and Shaw cracked the top-five battle. Sixteenth in the first segment, Hopkins caught Moore for the lead, making the pass with 40 laps to go. Shaw took third, with Clark and Doiron setting up for a fourth-place battle.

Cory Hall’s spin off turn four brought out the yellow flag for the first time in the segment on lap 84, bunching up the field for a sixteen-lap sprint to the checkers. Four laps later, a first-turn pileup brought out another caution, collecting Scorzelli, Scott McDaniel, and Ripley. Colby Benjamin took the worst of the wreck, retiring from the race with heavy front-end damage.

Moore was shipped to the outside groove on the restart, sinking through the top ten as Hopkins asserted himself out front. Shaw and Doiron assumed second and third, but neither could run down the Hermon, Me. ringer as he cruised to victory. Ripley limped to a 19th-place finish with minor damage.

Cookson finished fourth, putting himself in the overall lead with six points. Defending race winner Brown, Doiron, Shaw and Brandon Barker were all more than seven points back, relegated to a tight race for second on back if Cookson could make his way through traffic.

Dan Winter and Scorzelli cycled to the front row for the third segment. Scorzelli dispatched Winter quickly, breaking away from the field to lead the opening laps unchallenged. Winter held on for a few laps but yielded to Mike Rowe, Ripley, and early frontrunner Chicoine. Deeper in the field, Hopkins made his way through traffic in a hurry before losing pace and peeling off turn two for the paddock.

Rowe closed the gap on Scorzelli as the two chased down slower traffic, the septuagenarian hall-of-famer easily taking the point from the New Yorker. Once dethroned, Scorzelli fell through the top five. With thirty laps left in the race, Ripley rode in second with Chicoine, Stearns and Trevor Sanborn in pursuit.

Cookson rode mid-pack, but with his closest challengers only a few positions ahead.

Ripley caught Rowe about ten laps later, but as he challenged for the lead, Stearns made a bid for second, stacking up the field. McDaniel was caught up in the scramble, spinning from the pack and drawing the first caution of the segment on lap 83. Rowe held onto the lead, but further back, Doiron had climbed to sixth, six positions on the track ahead of Cookson.

Sanborn made a bold move on the restart, diving low to take Rowe and Ripley three-wide through turn two. Ripley pulled away on the high side as Rowe gathered up his car, with Doiron sliding high to take third. Nick Jenkins lost it in turn one on the next lap, with Barker and Chicoine spinning into the chaos. Cookson pinballed through the carnage as the yellow flag froze the field. Now scored ninth, Cookson was within a few positions of controlling his own destiny.

But mirth turned to mayhem as the field doubled up for the restart, the left front tire flattening on Cookson’s ride. Cookson ducked to the pits, came back out for a lap and ducked back in again, lining up shotgun on the field with sixteen laps left and his comfortable advantage erased.

Sanborn turned the heat up on the restart, giving Ripley fits as the rookie tried to fend off the veteran to his outside. Ripley kept his cool under pressure, hanging onto the lead as Doiron sat in third, ready to pounce.

With nine laps to go, Scorzelli and Dennis Spencer spun in turn one, scattering the field and collecting Jeremy Davis and Eddie MacDonald. Rowe and Cookson got a piece of the action as well, but Cookson remained on track, gaining ground on the leaders as the field gridded for the lap-91 restart.

Once again, Sanborn threatened for the lead on the outside, but Ripley parried back from the low line, keeping Sanborn at bay. Cookson, still in play for the overall win, diced through the field, every position that much closer to the victory.

In the battle of the rookie versus the veteran, youth prevailed as Ripley took the third-segment checkered flag over Sanborn.

In their mirrors, Stearns moved Doiron up the banking in turn four to make a play for third, but Doiron won the drag race down the frontstretch, barely edging out Stearns for the podium. Johnny Clark came home fifth.

Cookson, courtesy of his late charge, crossed the line 12th. Combined with his earlier finishes, he earned 18 points in the race. But Doiron’s 11th, third and third gave him 17 points.

By only one point, Doiron was crowned the overall PASS 400 winner.

Ripley’s two segment wins elevated him to third in the final rundown, breaking a tie with Sanborn and marking a career best PASS finish for the 15-year-old. Stearns’ last-ditch effort was good enough for fifth overall. Brown, last year’s winner, was scored sixth, ahead of Shaw, Corey Bubar, Clark and Barker.

Doiron’s victory was his third PASS win of 2024, all coming at Oxford, and two of them the longest races on the schedule. Ever the racer, Doiron was more concerned with the race he didn’t win.

“Didn’t get the one that mattered,” he said, referring to his sixth-place finish in the Oxford 250 after leading over half the race. “So it’s kinda the story of my life. We’ll try again next year!”

But Doiron was more than able to appreciate the realization of what he and car owner Peter Petit had in mind when joining forces last year. A win in May’s $30,000 North American Pro Stock Nationals at Lee USA Speedway set off a season that included the three PASS wins, a Granite State Pro Stock Series win at Claremont Motorsports Park, and well over $80,000 in big-race prize money for Petit to reinvest into the team.

“It’s been, honestly, an incredible year,” said Doiron. “Just, I mean, unreal. I mean, this car is so good. And we felt like every time we unloaded this car, we had a chance to win. Other than mechanical issues, we feel like we finished first or second. We’ve got a brand new one sitting on the floor that’s just like it. So I’m hoping next year, we’ll have two of them, and we’ll see what happens.”

Doiron was keen to keep a big-picture view from the outset.

“At the start, I wanted to know who we were racing,” he said. “I knew Max had a pretty big lead, so I really wasn’t worried about Max until we got down towards the end of it. I was more worried about, honestly I thought the best we were gonna be able to do was second. So I was racing D.J. and [Ripley], Gabe. That’s really who I was worried about, and then when I got through traffic a lot better than them, at that point it was like, well, maybe we have a chance at Max.

“Then once he got caught in the wreck, it was like, we just didn’t need to push the issue with the 09 and the 44, just finish it off and keep it in one piece.”

Stearns nearly took that strategy out of Doiron’s hands on the last lap. “That’s racing, I guess,” Doiron said. “I thought I left enough room going into three on the last lap, got twitched a little bit. But we beat him back to the line, so it worked out.”

Doiron’s win came in his return from a two-week layoff after fracturing his foot in a fall at home. Already out of the points race after a rain-delay conflict forced him to miss a race in May, Doiron sat out the races at Thunder Road and Thompson Speedway. Best among the drivers running limited schedules, Doiron ended up fifth in the season-long standings.

Further down the frontstretch, seventh-place finisher Shaw was able to officially celebrate not one, but two championships.

The Center Conway, N.H. native was unflinchingly consistent all season, winning twice, finishing second six times, and finishing every PASS event in the top ten. Shaw arrived at Oxford needing only to take the green flag to claim the crown. But Saturday’s engine failure made even that a challenge.

“It put us in a bad spot all weekend,” Shaw said. “Had an uphill battle today and we were able to do a pretty good job of digging out of it. We kind of mirrored last year a little bit. We were a little bit worse in the first one. We had trouble at the end of the first one. We started much much better last year, it was certainly not 35th.

“So to come out of that with a 13th, I thought, I was optimistic that it kept us in the hunt to finish that well, given who was coming and going at the end of that segment. I knew our tire strategy was not going to be optimal for what we were trying to do, because we put our best stuff first to dig out of the hole, and you’re going to pay for that later. It worked out in the sense of attrition like I thought it would, just it worked out for enough guys that we went from 4th to 7th in the last segment there. But that’s the risk you take.”

And the risk paid off. “If you could have told me seventh was what we were going to get when we started 35th, that’s pretty damn good. You take the good with the bad, and just end the year on a positive note.”

The positive note was Shaw’s sixth PASS North title, his first since 2020, leaving him one short of tying runner-up and seven-time champion Clark. With his win a week ago at Thompson Speedway, Shaw had already earned the PASS National Championship honors for his second time in three years.

And while Doiron’s season reflected the virtue of victories over points racing, Shaw favors the season-long grind.

“In the moment, the race wins are exciting,” Shaw said. “But you know, this is what we work for all year. This year, it kinda tailed off on the full-time competitors. But Johnny Clark is not a slouch. He’s one of the best in the country, in my opinion, not just New England. He’s one of the, if not the, most decorated PASS North racer ever. So any time you can beat him, he keeps you honest. I look at it as a very proud accomplishment. You have to beat the best to do it, even if it’s not a lot of the best guys all year, it’s still…Johnny’s been the mark since the inception of PASS.

“Every year it’s harder and harder to do this, so [we’re] just fortunate to be able to get another one, and try to get another one next year.”

More importantly, Shaw’s championship was his first for the new sponsor he and his team had signed early in 2023.

“We were very fortunate to land Bar Harbor Bank & Trust,” he said. “They wanted to get even more involved this year with Bar Harbor Wealth Management on there. Just very, very fortunate…it kind of just fell in our laps, really. It’s a fairy tale and we couldn’t be where we are without them.”

Shaw’s long-time supporters Julio and Rita Miglioli, owners of Quebec-based aerospace manufacturer Precision JLM, were impacted hard during the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing them to reduce their motorsports budget. And on the surface, it impacted Shaw’s efforts as well.

“When COVID hit and things shifted for JLM there, it killed them to cut back,” he said. “And it made us kind of reevaluate and cut back a little bit as well. We were fortunate, we had the help of Big Jim Renfrew there for a lot of it, and before that, we’d just piece together a sponsor here and a sponsor there, and we were able to hit most of the races there for a while, but not full seasons.”

Shaw’s PASS schedule skipped a few dates, but a new opportunity with American-Canadian Tour team owner Arnie Hill filled in the gaps. “Picked up the ACT ride and did that deal, and we got plenty of races in,” Shaw added. “[We were] very fortunate to race as much as we did. But as you can see this year, with the bank coming on board with both series, they stepped it up. They’re excited. This was their goal coming on board. We’re winning races and championships now, so hopefully we can keep it rolling for years to come with that partnership.”

Shaw has a long shot in two weeks at the ACT Tour season finale, where the two-time defending champion hopes to pull off a three-peat and deliver Bar Harbor an ACT title as well.

But for now, the highest fendered short-track honor in New England will have to do.

Unofficial Results
PASS North | PASS 400 (final standings after 3 100-lap segments)
Oxford Plains Speedway, Oxford, Me.
1. (73D) Joey Doiron
2. (32C) Max Cookson
3. (09R) Sylas Ripley
4. (44) Trevor Sanborn
5. (153) Travis Stearns
6. (47) Gabe Brown
7. (60) D.J. Shaw
8. (12X) Corey Bubar
9. (54) Johnny Clark
10. (88) Brandon Barker
11. (38) Garrett Lamb
12. (50) Eddie MacDonald
13. (5C) Dominic Curit
14. (01) Steve Chicoine
15. (15) Mike Hopkins
16. (03) Scott Moore
17. (14) Scott McDaniel
18. (4) Cory Hall
19. (32) Nick Jenkins
20. (5) Ben Rowe
21. (09D) Jeremy Davis
22. (24) Mike Rowe
23. (12S) Dennis Spencer, Jr.
24. (81) Dan Winter
25. (60B) Tim Brackett
26. (72) Scott Robbins
27. (18S) Michael Scorzelli
28. (10) Kate Re
29. (3B) Travis Buzzell
30. (19) Rusty Poland
31. (57) Austin Theriault
32. (8) Calvin Rose, Jr.
33. (BV52) Colby Benjamin
34. (29T) Austin Teras
DQ (29L) Ryan Littlefield
DNS (36) Ryan Robbins

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