Theriault Excited To Head To New Hampshire Motor Speedway
FORT KENT, Maine – When Austin Theriault heads to New Hampshire Motor Speedway this time around, he’ll feel a whole lot more comfortable.
Theriault, who debuted at New England’s largest speedway as an ACT Late Model Tour rookie in 2010, goes back to the 1.058-mile oval for the first-ever ACT points-paying race with his family-owned team for the ACT All-Star Challenge on Friday and Saturday, August 12-13. Theriault is tied for seventh in the overall ACT standings and heads into the event off a fifth-place effort last time out at Beech Ridge Motor Speedway.
Theriault is eager to return to the track that he first got a taste of last September.
“I think we’ll have a lot of fun,” Theriault said. “It will be exciting to go back with our program from last year and see if we can’t improve on what we did last year. I’m really looking forward to it.”
The 17-year-old from Fort Kent, Maine, will take the same No. 57 Varney Insurance Ford that he finished third with in the TD Bank Oxford 250 at Oxford Plains Speedway last month – where he became the youngest podium finisher in the 38-year history of one of the nation’s premier short-track events.
Qualifying for the two-day ACT All-Star Challenge will be held on Friday at New Hampshire, with the main event – a race broken into one 30-lap segment and one 50-lap segment – on Saturday as a companion to the IZOD IndyCar Series. There are expected to be as many as 60 entries vying for starting spots in Saturday’s field.
“Just qualifying is going to be a blast for the fans to watch, but from a driver’s point of view, it’s going to be pretty hairy,” Theriault said. “The thing we learned last year is that it’s really important to have a car you’re able to pass with. You can be faster than a guy in front of you, but you can also have a really hard time passing because of the ACT cars and the way they drive at Loudon.”
In addition to crew chief Mickey Green, the team has enlisted the help of Seth Holbrook for the weekend. Holbrook prepared the Oxford 250-winning car of NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver Kyle Busch, and he’s won races in numerous series in the northeast at numerous tracks.
“I think this will be the balancing point for the rest of our season,” Theriault said. “Having Seth come in, he brings a lot of experience, and he’s worked with a lot of guys and had some success. Mickey and I, we’re definitely going to bounce some ideas off of him.
“I think Seth can target the points where we need to improve, and we can really build on that for the second half of the year.”
That second half starts this week at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
“Obviously, the goal is to run better than you did the previous year – at any track you go to,” Theriault said. “Hopefully, we’ll go in there and have a shot at a Top-10. I’m pretty confident in guys we have coming to help out this year.
“Just like we talked about at the beginning of the year, we’ve made some changes again and we’re going forward. But we’ll continue to work hard and work with the people around us that have supported us since the beginning of my racing career.”