Adversity fails to slow N.H. driver> Avery retakes lead, cruises to big victory

SCARBOROUGH — After a 13-truck starting field had been reduced to nine hardy finishers, James Brown summed up what he’d learned in 100 paint-trading, tire-smoking laps of the PRO Truck Tour New England Dodge Dealers 100 on Saturday night.

“You didn’t want to lead this race,” said the Barrington, N.H., resident, who had made just that “mistake” in the early-going on the 3/8-mile Beech Ridge Motor Speedway oval.

Make that: You didn’t want to lead this race unless your name was David Avery.

While every leader of the race (including Avery) did have to deal with some adversity, the 19-year-old from North Woodstock, N.H., wasn’t slowed for long by his misfortune.

Brown inherited the lead from Avery on a lap 48 spinout and relinquished it to Seth Crocker six laps later when his own truck spun wildly down the front straight.

But after that, everybody — including eventual third-place finisher Brown, runner-up Laine Chase of Beverly Farms, Mass., and a sizeable crowd of racing fans, were left watching Avery beat up on the field.

Avery roared from the back of the pack to retake the lead in just eight laps.

“I thought it was gonna take 20 to 30 laps [to get the lead back],” Avery said. “Then I looked at the field and they were all gone. The next thing I know, I was third, second.”

In a tour that markets its “stock” nature, Avery proved that while he might have been driving the exact same truck as everyone else, there was a huge difference in how his ’99 Ford handled.

He, after all, led for the final 44 laps and was never challenged. Not in green-flag racing. Not on the lone restart in the race’s second half.

Never.

“The last part of the race when I took the lead over, I was just coasting,” Avery said. “I wasn’t even using the brakes in the turns. It was an incredible truck.”

Avery, who is in his second year on the four-year-old PRO Truck Tour, won his second straight race.

Brown was impressed by Avery’s effort.

“It’s one of those things, when you find the right setup and the right combination and it works for you just about everyplace you go” Brown said.

Jim Burns of Ashbury, N.J., finished fourth and Chip Keene of Auburn took fifth.

Brown said that some of the leaders’ problems were caused by impatience. He counted his restart spinout among those incidents.

“That one was all my fault. I think I was a little greedy a little too fast,” Brown said, pointing out that the PRO Tour trucks don’t handle very well when they’re loose, and by stomping on the accelerator coming out of turns, drivers can cause themselves problems.

Series points leader Johnny Clark of Hallowell put in a short night’s work on Saturday. He was penalized a lap for ignoring the flagman’s black flag ordering him off the track for a fuel cell check when he was leaking fuel on lap 8.

Clark never got a chance to make up the lap. He failed to get around a spun Hef Bader on lap 11 and smacked the stationary truck head-on in turn four as he tried to make up a half-lap deficit on the lead-lap pack.

Chase, who held the third slot, competes as a teammate of Avery. He admitted that he was unaccustomed to much success of his own.

“I’ve never done one of these before,” he said while conducting a post-race interview. “Usually I’m in the crash business.”

On Saturday, Chase made a big step from the crash business to the contender business by biding his time, fighting off a sometimes-sluggish truck, and taking advantage of a lap-92 crash that claimed second-place Crocker and third-place Chip Keene.

“Every restart it was like I had a flat tire,” Chase said of the handling problems. “For seven or eight laps I’d feel it out, and it would get a little loose, a little loose, a little loose, and then it would just take off like a rocket ship.”