Whelen Modified Tour Sunoco 100 Preview - Speedway Digest

The NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour will close out the weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway with the Sunoco 100 Saturday.

The series stays in the Northeast as they visited Riverhead Raceway in New York two weeks ago. It was a weekend of firsts, as John Beatty Jr. won his first pole and Eric Goodale captured his first Modified win.

Four Southern Modified Tour drivers are entered in Saturday’s race: JR Bertuccio, Bryan Dauzat, Spencer Davis and Andy Seuss.

Seuss is the most recent winner on the Southern Tour by scoring the victory at Caraway Speedway last Thursday. He has also won three of the season’s first six races. Seuss, along with the three other Southern Tour drivers, will look to shake things up on Saturday. Bertuccio, Dauzat and Seuss will also compete in the inaugural Whelen All-Star Shootout on Friday.

Defending Sunoco 100 winner Doug Coby started off his season in style with scooping up a win in the Battle of the Beach Modified race on the temporary backstretch course at the Daytona International Speedway in February. Coby has two wins in 2014 and looks to add a third with a repeat win at Loudon on Saturday.

Bobby Santos is the only other driver on the tour with two wins on the season. Santos has a best finish of fourth (three times) at the New Hampshire track.

Ryan Preece will have a busy weekend ahead of him, running both the All-Star Shootout and the Sunoco 100, as well as driving a NASCAR Nationwide Series (NNS) car for Tommy Baldwin Racing on Saturday. Preece was the first driver to enter the Shootout when the race was announced earlier in the season.

Todd Szegedy looks to continue his streak at Loudon as he won the fall race and snapped a 26-race winless streak. The Connecticut native made a last-lap pass on Donny Lia and the two beat and banged in turn three to score the victory. Szegedy ran three NNS races for Joe Nemechek’s team in 2004 and amassing a best finish of 15^th at Memphis Motorsports Park that October.

Another big name entered is Sprint Cup Series driver Ryan Newman. The Indiana native has three Cup wins and two Modified wins (both in 2010) at the Magic Mile.

All 20 drivers entered in Friday’s Whelen All-Star Shootout will also run the Sunoco 100, including Mike Stefanik, Ron Silk and Patrick Emerling, just to name a few.

The green flag for the Sunoco 100 will drop on Saturday at 1 p.m. as TV coverage for the race will be shown on Friday, July 18 at noon ET on FOX Sports 1. NASCAR Home Tracks will provide live updates to follow along with.

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Kyle Magda

Currently, I’m a journalism student in college who enjoys the sport of racing. I've been following NASCAR in-depth since 2001.Along with my love of racing, I’m also into baseball, football (college & pro), and college basketball.I also have my own website, The Life of Kyle, where I write about various topics.And to get my feet wet into radio, I have my own show called Overdrive. I started it with my friend. Since we can’t record together most of the time, we have our own versions. I cover NASCAR and ARCA, and he takes Formula One and IndyCar.Not forgetting to mention, I have my own YouTube channel as well.As for race tracks, I’ve gone to races at Pocono, Watkins Glen, Daytona, Dover, Loudon and a few local short tracks as well. I hope to cross the Indianapolis 500 off my list in the future. I hope to become a man of many hats.