4 min read

OXFORD — As the yellow flag waved on the final lap, Garrett Hall thought his chance at victory was waving goodbye.

The Scarborough native was just barely holding off the rest of a pack that included defending champion Joey Doiron in Wednesday’s Celebration of America 300 at Oxford Plains Speedway. With his opponents sporting much fresher tires, a rest for one final lap was not what he had in mind.

“I thought for sure I was a goner at that point,” Hall said. “We had 75 laps more on our tires than those guys did, and at that point I was thinking, ‘Well, maybe I can still salvage a top-five (finish out of this).’ We got lucky and the stars aligned.”

They certainly did after the yellow flag for Hall, who held off Doiron to win the second edition of the Celebration of America 300. Doiron finished second, just 0.098 seconds behind Hall, while Brandon Barker of Westbrook was third.

Two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Busch, competing in the race for the second straight year, exited on Lap 249 following the seventh caution. Busch was penalized a lap after passing cars in an illegal manner under caution and opted to leave rather than continue.

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Doiron led for most of the race, including from Laps 75-101 and again from 107-247 before pitting with 53 laps to go. The Berwick driver gradually closed in on Hall, who took the lead on Lap 248, but was unable to overtake him.

“I was running him down like nothing, but once it got to about three car lengths, I just got super tight,” Doiron said. “After that we were pretty equal; I was probably a little bit better, but I wasn’t good enough to get position on him without knocking him out of the way, and you can’t race your friends that way.”

Austin Teras of Gray rode the pole position to early dominance, leading for the first 56 laps before pitting on the first caution on Lap 57. Jimmy Renfrew Jr. of Candia, New Hampshire, then took the lead, which he held until Doiron overtook him on Lap 74.

Although Renfrew retook the lead from Doiron on Lap 101 out of the race’s third caution, Doiron grabbed it back only six laps later. He maintained it after the race’s fourth caution on Lap 124 and again on its fifth on Lap 182, fighting off a stern challenge from Teras in between.

No one could touch Doiron for the next 64 laps until he pitted on Lap 247, allowing Renfrew Jr. to retake the lead. Hall seized the lead for the first time one lap later and didn’t relinquish it — even as Doiron pushed him in a finish so tight Hall was uncertain as he crossed the finish line.

“I don’t know about how fun it was; it was a little nerve-wracking,” Hall said. “I just was trying to hang on for what I could and try to protect the bottom as best I could. … I knew around Lap 180 when my car was still running like it did at the start that I had a good car, and we maintained it and battled and battled all day.”

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The win was the second in three weeks for Hall, who also won the PASS Father’s Day Special 150 at Star Speedway on June 15 in Epping, New Hampshire. Before that he went nearly three years without a win — a drought that after Wednesday is well in the rear-view mirror.

“It feels really good to be able to keep the momentum going,” said Hall, who earned $20,000 for his victory. “We’ve had good cars but we’ve never been able to get ourselves in the position that we needed to, and that’s something we’ve learned over the past year. I really feel like that’s what it comes down to.”

Teras, who was near the front for most of the evening, left after a wreck involving Mike Rowe of Turner that led to the final caution. Teras had been just about neck-and-neck with Hall and Doiron prior to the crash.

Barker, meanwhile, had been outside the top five for much of the night prior to Lap 300. But after using the final caution to put on a fresh set of tires, he was able to roar past all but Hall and Doiron to pull out a podium finish on a night where his car was, in his own words, “peddling for all it had.”

“I don’t know how far back I was during that yellow — I can’t count that high,” Barker said. “We got lucky there with that yellow, put a fresh set on and let it rip. It just all seemed to work out.”

Mike Mandell came to the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel in April 2022 after spending five and a half years with The Ellsworth American in Hancock County, Maine. He came to Maine out of college after...

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