Tested: Doug Coby Shows Necessary Resolve With Whelen Modified Tour Rally At NHMS

LOUDON, N.H. – Championships in motorsports usually aren’t decided by counting visits to victory lane.

(Photo: Corey Sipkin/NASCAR)

The great days help, but in the end it’s usually the team that can salvage good days when all looks bad that end up raising the big trophy when the season is through.

Over the winter, when asked if his Wayne Darling owned team had what it took to compete for a NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour title, Doug Coby said he was confident they had what it took to get the job done at most tracks the division visits.

But Coby pointed to New Hampshire Motor Speedway as one place where the team had its questions marks.

Saturday during the Town Fair Tire 100 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Coby answered the questions. Like a boxer coming off the ropes after giving away the first eight rounds of a championship fight, Coby showed he and his team have the mettle to turn a bad day upside down by rallying to a third place finish.

Coby started third but went backwards at the start.

“I’m sure you guys saw me pit probably four times before the halfway break,” Coby said. “We were just struggling on that Nationwide Series rubber and the [Sprint] Cup rubber really bad. Sometimes the track comes around and sometimes it doesn’t. I think for a lot of guys from like fifth or seventh on back the track never really came into their cars. We just made the right adjustments at the [halfway] break. I don’t know how it happened but we just found ourselves in the top-five with 10 [laps] to go and just tried to make some smart moves.”

Coby left New Hampshire Motor Speedway leading the standings with 261 points, 16 better than Ron Silk, the 2011 series champion.

After six of 14 events this year, Coby has three victories, a second place, a third place and in eighth place.

Last year Coby brought two teams together to make a full-time run on the Whelen Modified Tour with Darling fielding his ride for half the events and a team put together by Harvey Berube and Kevin Crowley fielding rides for the other half of the season.

He ended the 2011 season fifth in the Whelen Modified Tour standings with one win, four top-five’s and 10 top-10’s in 16 events.

This year Darling stepped up to field a full-time ride for Coby and the group kicked off the season with an eighth place finish in the Icebreaker 150 at Thompson International Speedway on April 15. Coby then won three of the next four events.

Saturday proved the test of championship makeup for he and his team.

“It feels awesome,” Coby said. “My guys work really hard and we had a good car in practice, we qualified well and we had a good morning practice session. To start third and be back to 12th by lap four and come in and pit a bunch of times, you just can’t give up. That’s not points racing, that’s just racing. When you give up that means you’re defeated and our team isn’t going to be defeated, until [the last race] we’re going to give it our all.”

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