Roger Brown says winning the 34th annual TD Banknorth Oxford 250 hasn’t sunk in yet.

“It doesn’t seem like it really happened. It’s hard to believe,” said the 28-year-old Lancaster, N.H., native, who took home $35,800 after leading all but one of the final 118 laps.

Brown was making his debut in the Oxford 250.

This was the first year that the race used economical Late Model cars instead of the expensive Pro Stocks.

Brown races Late Models on the American-Canadian Tour and said he never would have been able to enter the race if it was for Pro Stocks because he can’t afford one.

“This gave a lot of people the opportunity to run who had never been able to before,” said Brown.

Up until Sunday night, it hadn’t been a good year for Brown. He is just ninth in points in the ACT series.

“The last month and a half, we’ve had good race cars, but we’ve had bad luck. We’d been fast everywhere, but things happened to us that prevented us from winning races,” said Brown. “In our last race at White Mountain [Motorsports Park, N.H.], the engine blew up in practice and we had to go back and get the backup car. We struggled to get in the race and struggled throughout the race.”

“But all the pain and suffering have been worth it [to win the Oxford 250],” added Brown, who noted that he and his crew knew they had a fast car.

He has attended several Oxford 250s and said it proved to be beneficial.

“I learned a lot by watching people race. That’s how I learned our pit strategy,” said Brown.

Brown began 30th in the race, so he pitted earlier than most of the drivers ahead of him. Racers back in the pack don’t really lose any track position by doing that. He pitted for four fresh tires on lap 90.

“You can’t rely on passing 29 cars on the racetrack. You have to take a chance and come up with a pit strategy that will work. You don’t want to beat the car and the tires to death [coming up through the pack] because you won’t have anything left at the end,” explained Brown. “If you start up front, you don’t have the ability to take chances. You end up pitting when everybody else does.”

After his pit stop, Brown said he tucked his car on the preferred bottom groove and “rode around picking off cars. I didn’t have to use my car up.”

By the time the fast cars pitted in the middle of the race and everything cycled around, he found himself in second place. He took the lead on lap 142.

He said he had also observed that in ACT races he had run there in the past, the tires hadn’t “fallen off that much” during the course of the race.

“You lost two- or three-tenths [of a second in lap times] from the beginning to the end of the race and that isn’t that much,” said Brown.

One of the other things he learned from attending previous Oxford 250s is “not to pass the pace car” during caution laps.

“A lot of people were penalized for passing the pace car,” noted Brown.

One of those penalized drivers was Busch East driver Eddie MacDonald, who went a lap down and never got back on the lead lap although he had a fast car.

Brown also knew he had to be patient. When he drew a 10th starting position for the heat race, he knew cracking the top three in a 20-lap race to earn a spot in the 250 was unrealistic and risky.

“So I tried to set myself up for the consi [consolation race],” said Brown, who finished fourth in the heat race to earn the pole in a consolation heat race. He wound up second in the consi and, since the top three finishers in the heat and consolation races qualified, he was in.

Brown began his racing career 13 years ago and gradually moved up to Late Models. This is his fifth year in Late Models and in the ACT series. His best points finish was fourth last year.

Brown, a mechanic for the Morrill Construction Co. (N.H.), said he and his crew prepared for the Oxford 250 for a couple of weeks.

One of the areas they mastered was restarts as he pulled away from the rest of the field.

“You have to be able to restart well. You’ve got to get the jump, you’ve got to get a run out of turn four so you’ve got position going into turn one,” said Brown.

Brown enjoys running at OPS.

“I love racing at Oxford. It’s wide and smooth. It’s a demanding track physically. You get a workout,” said Brown, who is the married father of a 6-year-old boy, Braxton.

So what does he intend to do with his winnings?

“I’ll put it back into racing,” said Brown, who plans to defend his title next year.