{"id":19455,"date":"2015-07-23T10:00:18","date_gmt":"2015-07-23T14:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/?p=19455"},"modified":"2015-07-23T07:35:44","modified_gmt":"2015-07-23T11:35:44","slug":"act-tour-resumes-championship-chase-at-oxford-plains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/2015\/07\/act-tour-resumes-championship-chase-at-oxford-plains\/","title":{"rendered":"ACT Tour Resumes Championship Chase at Oxford Plains"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fsrdxfc\"<\/a>Waterbury, VT \u2013 The American-Canadian Tour (ACT) resumes its 2015 championship chase this Saturday, July 25 at Oxford, ME\u2019s Oxford Plains Speedway. The Oxford Plains 150 is the eighth on the ACT Tour\u2019s 13-race schedule and their second visit of the season to the 3\/8-mile oval. The event was previously scheduled for June 27 before being postponed.<\/p>\n

The second half of the year will see the continued championship battle between New Hampshire veterans Wayne Helliwell Jr. and Joey Polewarczyk Jr. Two-time ACT Tour Champion Wayne Helliwell Jr. holds a 17-point lead over defending Champion \u201cJoey Pole\u201d with each driver recording three wins to date.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

While Helliwell earned a third-place finish in this past Sunday\u2019s ACT International at Airborne Park Speedway, Pole spun twice en route to a 13th-place result. Pole led every lap of the Tour\u2019s season opener at Oxford in April and is eager to get the title chase started again.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems like it\u2019s been a long time since White Mountain,\u201d Pole said. \u201cWe\u2019ve done some racing in between, and just haven\u2019t had the best of luck; it\u2019s been kind of a rough month so far. Hopefully we can get back to Oxford and get things going back in the right direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite rough days in both the ACT and PASS events at Airborne, Pole is confident that his team still has what it takes to chase a second consecutive title.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way we\u2019re looking at the International is that everything that happened in both races was out of our control,\u201d he said. \u201cWe got a flat tire with the PASS car, and then another flat tire with the ACT car, and then ran into some trouble with a lapped car. Hopefully that\u2019s all the bad luck we\u2019re going to have and we got it out of the way then. In racing you really can\u2019t control everything that happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

An enticing battle is shaping up behind the two ACT Tour leaders as well, as just 56 points separate third-place Jeff White from ninth-place Kyle Welch. Winthrop, ME\u2019s White returns to the track where he won the 2011 Late Model Championship and recorded his first ACT Tour win with a chance to widen the gap over the rest of the field.<\/p>\n

Fourth-place point driver Travis Stearns also considers Oxford his home track and believes his Richard Green Racing team is better than their seventh-place result in April, while Brad Babb is looking for his second win of the season after being felled by a flat tire in the first Oxford event. Barre, VT\u2019s Nick Sweet is riding the wave of his nearly $11,000 triumph in the ACT International and aims for his first point-counting Tour win of 2015.<\/p>\n

Fellow Vermonter Emily Packard finished a season-best fourth in the Oxford opener after starting 20th and hopes to do even better the second time around. Brandon Atkins earned a season-best fifth-place result in the International and is looking for redemption after getting spun out of the lead in the Tour\u2019s most recent event at White Mountain Motorsports Park. A win would also be an early birthday present for Atkins, who turns 19 on July 30.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Waterbury, VT \u2013 The American-Canadian Tour (ACT) resumes its 2015 championship chase this Saturday, July 25 at Oxford, ME\u2019s Oxford Plains Speedway. The Oxford Plains 150 is the eighth on the ACT Tour\u2019s 13-race schedule and their second visit of the season to the 3\/8-mile oval. The event was previously scheduled for June 27 before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[55,124,14972],"tags":[15721],"class_list":["post-19455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-act","category-oxford-plains-spedway","category-touring-series-news","tag-oxford-plains"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19456,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19455\/revisions\/19456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}