Race Day Information
2020 Annual Meeting Announcement: Confirmed for Sunday, Feb. 9, 2020
Important Notice to NEAR Members:
The Annual meeting initially planned for Sunday, Jan.12,2020 has been postponed. The recent loss of our beloved Treasurer, Newsletter, and Membership Chairman Val LeSieur has presented issues that cannot be resolved quickly. We are working to solve these issues and put new people in place.
Update Monday, 1/6/2020
The Annual Meeting re-schedule date is confirmed for Sunday, Feb. 9,2020, at the Thompson, Ct. Speedway Clubhouse. 11:00 a.m. arrival/social hour, 12:00 lunch for 2020 paid members. Membership forms will be available/ accepted at the door, $25.00. All others $10.00 charge.
There will be Elections of Officers at the meeting per By Laws changes from last year. I will be running once again for President, and the rest of our officers, as well. Officers will be elected by a simple majority of votes by those present at the meeting.
Anyone interested in filling a position on the Board of Directors or Advisors, contact Rich at (860)209-7343 or rgoucher@comcast.net. Please do so by Friday, Jan. 31st, 2020 to allow time to put your name on the ballot for the meeting. Thank you.
NEAR at Seekonk this Saturday!!
This Saturday 8/10/19 NEAR will be at Seekonk Speedway in Massachusetts. Pit gates open at 2 pm.
The Hall of Fame truck and our running event will be on the schedule. A beautiful day for racing is expected, and we will be having another kid’s bike raffle as well!
See you all at the Cement Palace!
Near HOF Truck, Member Cars Appear
HISTORIC MOTOR SPORTS EXPOSITION COMES TO LOUDON
LOUDON, NH: On Saturday May 4th the North East Motor Sports Museum (922 Route 106 Loudon, NH) will host the most diverse regional gathering of historical race cars, mobile museums, personalities and artifacts ever seen in New England. The expo will feature a variety of different racing disciplines including road racing, oval track racing, drag racing, off-road racing and more.
The featured attractions of the day will be all of the northeast’s mobile museums that will appear together for the first time. The museums are Ron Bouchard Racing, New England Antique Racers, Maine Vintage Race Car Association, Bob Doyle Museum – A Photo History of Vermont Racing and the Ollie Silva Museum. Two museums with physical building locations the ProNyne Motorsports Museum and Owls Head Transportation Museum will also join us.
1992 and 1993 NASCAR Busch North Champion the “Irish Angel” Dick McCabe, six time American Canadian Tour Champion Robbie Crouch and the only four time NASCAR Busch North Series Champion Andy Santerre will join us as our featured personalities. Museum president Dick Berggren will host conversations throughout the day with all three champions.
For one day only the museum will host a diverse group of cars from beyond New England’s boarders. See a 1984 March Indycar driven by Danny Ongais, a Formula 5000 racer in addition to New England classics such as the 1400 horsepower Country Girl Funny Car and stock cars from the Senior Tour Auto Racers club.
Join us on Saturday May 4th from 10am to 3pm and enjoy the one day exhibits as well as the museums 30+ cars, slot car track and iRacing Simulator. We rev up the engines at noon which will be followed by a barbeque lunch and we end the day with giveaway prizes. Members are admitted free to the museum with free lunch and non-members pay $10 entry free and a small donation for lunch. To display your historic race car or artifacts call executive director Tom Netishen at 603-783-0183. A rain date of May 5th has been set and Groupons are not accepted for this event.
About: The North East Motor Sports Museum is owned by the Racing History Preservation Group, a 501-c-3 educational non-profit organization that seeks to discover, preserve and share the history of motorsports in the Northeast. The 10,000 square foot museum opened in 2017 on the grounds of the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon, NH.
Logano makes New England, Connecticut, proud!!
A decade’s worth of lessons deliver Joey Logano first championship
The 18-year-old kid replacing Tony Stewart was no Tony Stewart.
He owned a résumé that included plenty of wins but only one in 19 races of Xfinity Series experience. He joined a team on which the former driver knew what he wanted in a car, and if not, he carried the car on his shoulder with an attitude that won dozens of races and a couple of championships.
“I got humbled pretty quick,” Logano said Sunday after winning the NASCAR Cup Series title. “I guess ‘humbled’ is the word. I don’t know, I got beat up. I got pushed around a lot. I wasn’t fast. I didn’t have no respect. I think that beats up on your confidence pretty quickly, and you have to kind of dig back inside.
“Every sport is a mental sport, so you have to really figure out how to be strong again and dig out of holes.”
The only saving grace during those merciless growing-pain years came in that Xfinity Series, where he won 17 races over four years.
But that Cup Series? Gosh, was that a different story. He had a couple of wins but never finished higher than 16th in points.
Joey Logano, after four years at Joe Gibbs Racing, knew he was out of a ride in 2012, and there was a time he didn’t even know if he would find another seat in the Cup garage.
“I expected to go out there and win … and just got my butt handed to me on a platter,” Logano said. “It was hard. There’s a lot of times that I felt really weak and I’d break down, and it was just hard.
“You know, when you’re confused, you don’t know how to be better. You’re 18 years old or 19 or 20, and this is some pretty big stuff for a teenager to be able to go through, sitting up here, talking to you guys [in the media], trying to handle all those situations. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
He found a new home at Team Penske in 2013, in part just by luck when AJ Allmendinger was fired after failing a NASCAR drug test. And with the new life in his career, he changed. That meek, weak driver? They didn’t see that in the halls at Penske.
“When he walked in at Team Penske, he owned the opportunity,” Logano crew chief Todd Gordon said. “He walked in, and I think Roger [Penske] believed in him, as I did, and I looked at it and said, ‘Here’s a kid who wins more races in the Gibbs Busch cars at the time than Kyle [Busch] did, so he’s capable.’
“He just needed an opportunity. So he came in and believed in himself, and we believed in him, and at that point, he was not weak.”
Just five races into his Penske life, he went face-to-face with that Stewart guy, arms swinging, after Stewart took issue with Logano’s aggressiveness on restarts.
“I’m going to bust his ass,” Stewart said after their confrontation.
Logano didn’t seem all that worried and put it behind him. He won a race that first year and finished eighth in the standings. He then won 11 races over the next two years, learning how to use his bumper when needed to move someone with the hopes of not wrecking them.
“Honestly, I guess I just felt like I’m back to where I was growing up,” Logano said. “As the kid growing up, I was an aggressive racer and I was able to win a lot of races.”
Sure, he made more mistakes along the way. His lack of contrition for previous incidents likely led at least in part to Matt Kenseth’s dumping him at Martinsville in 2015, which eventually eliminated Logano from the playoffs and earned Kenseth a two-week suspension.
In those duels with Kenseth, Logano in some ways changed the rules of the NASCAR playoffs. NASCAR chairman Brian France, to the chagrin of many, called Logano’s roughing up Kenseth for a win at Kansas “quintessential NASCAR,” and it appeared all was fair game.
In that atmosphere, the fearless Logano continued to thrive, and that fearless attitude won him more races, as well as allowed him to handle missing the playoffs entirely last year. As the 2018 season made the turn from summer to fall and Logano saw his cars improve, he combined his aggressiveness with an attitude, a swagger that he rode to the 2018 Cup title.
It seemed appropriate that he won the championship with a strong short-run car at Homestead-Miami Speedway. It rewarded him for doing a lot more taking than giving on restarts. On the restart with 15 laps to go, Logano was in third but really was the favorite.
He didn’t have to worry about Martin Truex Jr. retaliating for their Martinsville dustup as he drove by — once Logano got past Truex, he was too strong for Truex to even get close to make a move.
All those years of getting beat up, all those years of struggles when it appeared he might not win another Cup race, let alone a championship, rode with him in those final 12 laps as he drove to the biggest victory — the 21st of his Cup career — of his 28-year-old life.
“The opportunity to make mistakes is one of the best things that can ever happen to you,” Logano said. “I made a lot of mistakes, a lot of mistakes in front of all of you, things I shouldn’t say or whatever it was, but there’s no regrets, either, because that’s formed me into the man I am today.
“And if it wasn’t for each and every one of those mistakes, I wouldn’t be sitting here today. … God teaches you many lessons, sometimes the hard way. But I wouldn’t take any of them back. Even if we didn’t win today, I wouldn’t.”
NEAR Banquet Tickets Going Fast!
Tickets for the 2018 NEAR Hall of Fame Banquet on Sunday, Nov. 11, 2018 are selling briskly. With Ted Christopher and Mike Stefanik leading a fine group into the Hall, friends, family, and fans want to be there to see the induction.
Jump on board and get yours now! Also available for promoting your business or team is the Hall of Fame Program, with very reasonable rates. See below for the links to download both forms. See you at the banquet!!!!
NEAR visits the Ron Bouchard Museum
This past weekend’s stop on the NEAR schedule was at the Ron Bouchard Museum in Fitchburg, Ma. A very nice turnout of cars both modified and cruise style alike gathered for the yearly visit. An awesome cookout was provided, with a live band, as all enjoyed the hot but beautiful weather. This is a must see destination for any race fan. Many thanks for the hospitality shown by Paula Bouchard, Bergie, volunteers, and staff who ran the event flawlessly. Thanks also to the participants who brought together a fine assortment of cars.
NEAR Event postponed at Seekonk!
The NEAR Event at Seekonk has been postponed due to weather. We will be working on a re-scheduled date!
Saturday, August 11th, 2018, the vintage racing cars of NEAR take to the high banks of the Seekonk Raceway. The Hall of Fame Truck will be on the midway, and the stars of NEAR will race heats and a feature during the racing program. Pit gate opens at 3 p.m. with practice to follow. Come down and see some of the best examples of New England Racing history compete just like in years past.
