For 2017 the Mods were part of a three-way Saturday affair that opened with the Truck Series. Christopher Bell dominated after some dicing with teammate Noah Gragson and Ryan Truex, and his career arc keeps growing the more he wins.
The most anticipated race was the FW Webb 100 for the Modifieds. This race took on greater bittersweetness as its unofficial name became the Ted Christopher Memorial. Christopher became the most controversial racer in New England annals - one incident among many tells the story - in 1998 at Stafford Motor Speedway he spun out rival Chris Jones; with previous encounters leading up to this Jones raced all the way around and plowed over Chrostopher's nose while under caution - and perhaps the most accomplished, winning over 100 SK Modified races at Stafford Motor Speedway alone to go with ten wins in NASCAR's Busch North series and 42 in the Modified Tour. Wherever he raced in New England, people felt his impact, and controversy would follow him - not least with the criminal dealings of his longtime former team owner Jimmy Galante.
For 2017's FW Webb 100 the racing centered on Doug Coby and Patrick Emerling, but in the final thirty laps a restart led to a massive fight for the lead among some eight drivers, including the largely-unnoticed Bobby Santos. Santos stormed into the lead but another late yellow appeared to doom him. He got away on the restart in the final five laps, then his pursuers made a colossal mistake - fighting each other instead of pushing past Santos, and thus leaving him long gone to he win.
And yet the Mod Tour 100 wasn't even the big story of the day. That went to the American-Canadian Tour's regular 50-lapper to close out Saturday's affair. ACT does not count caution laps for its New Hampshire races and reverts to last completed lap when yellows fly - and both rules blew up in ACT's face as crashes galore required four restarts to complete one lap, and then there were two red flags - one when the leaders plowed into the sand barrels abutting the pit wall off Four - to where it took two hours to complete eighteen laps.
The worst part was the fight for the lead was excellent throughout - ACT's cars run bias-ply tires and are the kind of long-snout lean raked roofline aerocoupe bodies NASCAR once ran and really should be running again - and the one burned when the race was ended short of halfway was ACT regular Jimmy Hebert, a Williamstown, VT native, 26 years of age, who won twice in ACT in 2013 and has thirteen additional top-fives and twenty-one additional top-tens in sixty career ACT starts. He battled budding New England racing legend Woody Pitkat and before the race was stopped he fell behind Pitkat in Turn One by two lengths then threw the car four lengths deeper through Two into the lead - and the pass was nullified by another yellow.
Pitkat certainly drove a superb race, and this was one of those times where the fact someone had to lose was nothing to be proud of. The crowd was angry over the entire caution fiasco, and this affair requires ACT to reconsider two monumentally flawed rule approaches for its New Hampshire races.
Bittersweet thus never tasted so bitter - or sweet.
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