Sammy Rameau Earns Whelen Modified Tour Sunoco Rookie of the Year Honors

Sammy Rameau (Photo: Jim DuPont/RaceDayCT)

Mission accomplished for Sam Rameau.

The Westminster, Massachusetts, driver entered the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour season looking to capture the Sunoco Rookie of the Year honors, and when the 16-race championship points schedule was over, Rameau was celebrating.

RACING-REFERENCE: Sam Rameau 2019 Season

He adds his name to a list of 20 drivers in the history of the series who have earned the award — including champion names like Todd Szegedy, Donny Lia and Justin Bonsignore.

“It’s pretty cool to have my name in the record books — this is a prestigious award,” Rameau said. “It was definitely some really good competition between Timmy Catalano, J.B. Fortin and myself.”

Rameau’s best finish of the year was eighth, twice — coming in the NAPA Spring Sizzler at Stafford Motor Speedway in May, and Thompson Speedway Motorsports Park’s Thompson 125 in June. He finished 14th in the championship standings, and beat Fortin by 48 points in the final tally, with Catalano a close third.

This year was a much of a learning curve for Rameau as anything else in his racing career. His experience previously was in Modifieds in New Hampshire, but it was limited.

“Places that I’ve never seen before, like Myrtle Beach, South Boston, Oswego… all of them I barely had any laps at,” Rameau said. “The only track I had some experience was Seekonk because  I raced a Legend Car there. But it was cool to sit in tech with some big names at Thompson because we won the Rookie of the Year.”

As of now, Rameau isn’t sure what his 2020 season is going to look like — but he’s hoping to return to try and accomplish his next goal — winning a Whelen Modified Tour race.

“This year was a definite success, we learned a lot,” Rameau said. “There were a lot of ups and down, and some DNF’s at the end of the year.. We had a break, a wreck… we came out of Thompson making gains. The finish doesn’t always prove how good the weekend really was.”


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Comments

  1. Congrats Sammy, good work

  2. It was a competition this year for Rookie of the Year with Timmy C. making a full effort for the award. Could he have won it if the family could focus solely on his effort? We’ll never know.
    It was a good year for the Rameau clan. Average of 15th place for the first 6 completed races and 14 for the last 6 non DNF races. Three crashes later in the year but one at the Musket when he was contending for a top finish. Four DNF’s compared to 6 for Timmy so stuff happens in the rookie game.
    They left the VMRS under unfortunate circumstances for sure. It’s a new challenge and frankly I think we’re lucky to have a top young talent in the series lake Rameau and Timmy C as well to watch grow.

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