Offseason Spotlight: Gray Rides Wave of Speed, New Attitude to First Street Stock Championship

Alan Ward photo

Barre, VT – For half his life, East Thetford, VT’s Brandon Gray has been racing throughout the Northeast. While he’d won plenty of races before 2020 and shown raw talent behind the wheel, he’d never been able to win a championship.

This past year, that all changed. Armed with a fast car, a dedicated crew, and a new attitude, the 23-year-old Gray rolled to the rk Miles Street Stock championship at Barre’s Thunder Road. It was his first title in any division and cemented him as one of the young auto racing stars in the region.

In truth, the seed for his 2020 title run was planted late in the 2019 season. Gray spent that summer racing in the Pro Stock class at Malta, NY’s Albany-Saratoga Speedway, but grew weary of the 7-hour round-trip drive. He finally decided that he wanted to run the Milk Bowl at Thunder Road and see where it would take him.

After purchasing a car from Chris Beattie that was ready to race, Gray went out and won the pole for the Street Stock Mini Milk Bowl. He was leading Segment 1 before a mechanical failure, but came back to win Segment 2. Armed with that initial success, Gray entered the 2020 rk Miles Street Stock season with one goal in mind.

“It sounds arrogant, but (our goal) was to win the championship,” Gray said. “Anything less was going to be a complete letdown just due to the way the car was. The car was perfect. It was very quick, it was consistent. That was our goal going in.”

Alan Ward photo

The hard charger came out of the box strong in his familiar #00. In the first three events of the year, Gray finished 2nd, 3rd, and 1st. His Connecticut Valley Auto Auctions/C.W. Gray & Sons Auctioneers machine was clearly fast enough to contend that elusive championship.

“It really made me confident after those first three weeks,” Gray said. “I thought, ‘we really have a car that is good enough to drive from 15th, 14th, 17th on any night and win. As long you keep the tires on it, you can win.” Building that confidence early was key to keeping everybody’s focus and drive, and keeping the mission the same every week.”

Those charges to the front continued all summer long. All told, Gray racked up 14 top-10 finishes in 15 point-counting Street Stock events. Week after week, he came from deep in the field to be a factor before the event was over.

He did so by adding an important weapon to his arsenal: patience. Instead of trying to force his way to the front, Gray waited for the opportunities, knowing he’d be able to take advantage when they came.

“In years past, I’ve always been a guy that either wins or wrecks it — or gets DQ’ed in tech,” Gray admitted. “But this year, I decided that the whole wrecking thing can’t happen if you want to win a championship. Years ago, I would have made a hole just big enough for the car to get through. This year, I waited for the holes to get there, knowing that the car was fast enough. As soon as the hole was there, we could pick off a spot here and a spot there. I knew we didn’t have to win every week — we just had to finish consistently.”

“I think it’s the years of maturity, and the years of failure, and understanding why I failed in the past,” Gray added. “Those are the only reasons that it worked this year. I’ve failed a lot of times. I’ve won a lot of races, and I’ve led the points at a lot of places, but I’d always do something stupid, like wreck the car or get mouthy. This year, the maturity level changed a lot within myself.”

Alan Ward photo

That maturity was first put to the test at the July 16 Vermont Governor’s Cup. Two days beforehand, Gray’s family business was destroyed by a fire. As such, the car wasn’t up-to-date on maintenance, and Gray had trouble focusing on the event. Then a wheel bearing failed six laps into the feature, bringing the caution out and seemingly compounding an already bad week.

“I literally shut down mentally and physically,” Gray remembered. “I kind of felt defeated at that point. I pulled into the pits, got out of the car, got in the truck, and just sat there, because I didn’t really know what to do. It was a tough week for me, and I didn’t even know what to say. Then somebody came to the window and said, ‘the car is ready. They’re under caution — they haven’t gone green yet.’ They’d changed the whole wheel bearing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with those on a front-wheel drive car, but you’ve got to pull the axle, the hub — there’s a real process to it. And they did it all in about three minutes and got us back out there.”

“We ended up going from about 20th to 4th and took a terrible night to a good night,” Gray continued. “That really saved the season, to be honest. That was such a hard week on me mentally, I don’t know how would have handled it if things just kept going worse and worse.”

Buoyed by that miracle turnaround, Gray pulled away from the pack. He picked up his second win and seventh top-5 of the year at Cody Chevrolet-Cadillac Night on August 6. At that point, Gray had more than a full event’s worth of points on his nearest challenger.

“Cody Chevrolet-Cadillac Night is one of the races that I look back on a lot,” Gray said. “In any race you have where you’re starting deep in the pack, you kind of anticipate not being able to win. On Cody Chevrolet Night, we started 16th, and we rode the top, the bottom, and the middle — and won. I think there was one yellow flag, or maybe two. It wasn’t like we just passed all the cars because they wrecked. That sticks out to me, because at the end of the year, my car could have won a car show. Who can drive from 16th and not hit a car, not scratch the car, not tear the car up every week? That night sticks out to me because of that.”

Alan Ward photo

However, another test was coming on August 23. For about 15 hours, it looks like Gray had swept both the Bolduc Metal Recycling Enduro 200 and the 50-lap Street Stock Special. However, further tested discovered an engine violation in the Street Stock, stripping Gray’s victory and erasing most of of his point lead with only three events to go. Looking back on it, though, Gray was able to find some positives about the ordeal.

“The whole day was in my mind, whether we got DQ’ed or not, picture-perfect for me,” Gray said. “I always set out every year to win that. Enduro, and I never had. I’d led it a lot of years, but never could win it. I was like, ‘alright, we won the Street Stock race.’ And once you’re in the Enduro car, you have no idea what’s going on outside the track. You don’t know what’s happening in tech. So I was sitting answering questions about the Enduro, and then once I got done, they said we were in tech. And I thought, ‘alright, the motor’s been checked before. It’s a 3.5-year-old motor, so it’s been checked plenty of times.’ So to have it come back not okay was something I was pretty upset with. I thought, ‘well, that just defeats the whole championship run because we’re going to be penalized.’

“But it actually was beneficial, because when we took the motor apart afterwards, we found some issues in the top end that we didn’t know about. So we bolted a new head on it with new valve springs. It ended up being like an insurance policy. We never would have torn it apart if we didn’t get caught.”

Once again, Gray was able to rebound. He finished the point-counting season with finishes of 7th, 2nd, and 7th, pulling away again to take the title by 45 points. In the 14 events where he was credited with a result, Gray had an average finish of 4.5.

Gray also joined his late father Troy as a Thunder Road Street Stock champion and Enduro winner. Troy had won the first Street Stock title in 1987 and then took the Enduro 200 in 2008. The magnitude of what Brandon accomplished finally hit him while waiting to emerge from his car in Victory Lane.

“I’ve raced since I was 12,” Gray said. “I’m 23 now. For the last 11 years I’ve raced, and I’ve always come up short. Not due to a lack of car or mechanical skill, but due to a lack of maturity. So once I put all the pieces together and was able to win, and sit there in Victory Lane with all the people that support me, care about me, and care about my success — it really hit me. I got a little teary-eyed there in Victory Lane. I was like, ‘this really just happened at Thunder Road.’”

“Since I was I kid — I was five, maybe four — I used to go with my old man and sit on Bud Hill,” Gray continued. “The thing that always stuck out to me was the Final Countdown song when the Late Models used to roll out there. And I always wanted to be one of those guys that somebody knew about. Winning a Street Stock championship isn’t a huge deal to some, but it made it a full circle to me from when I was a kid. Now that I’ve got the championship off my list, now it’s just go win races and have fun.”

Even in the middle of a championship run, Gray was already starting work on his next step. A conversation around a campfire at White Mountain Motorsports Park, led to Gray purchasing a Flying Tiger that has previously been driven by Kaleb and Jason Rogers.

His Tiger journey got off to a bad start, blowing a rear end four laps into a private practice day.  After getting a replacement part from John Donahue, Gray went to the Jon Parks Tractor Triple Crown Series event on August 22 and topped the speed charts in the day’s first session. He finished fourth that night, then added podium finishes at WMMP Championship Night and the Flying Tiger Oxford Open.

“That car is really the greatest starter car you could ever ask for,” Gray surmised. “It was cheap, it was relatively inexpensive to run, and if it got bent or I made a mistake, it really wasn’t going to be a huge financial loss — unlike some people that I think spend a lot of money to get started. I think we spent five grand and went racing. We had fun and we got some good results.”

At this time, Gray is undecided about his plans for 2021. While he hopes to race the Flying Tigers weekly at either Thunder Road or White Mountain Motorsports Park, he has not yet chosen which track. He noted that Thursdays are when the family business holds its weekly car auction, and work always comes first — especially since running a Tiger will almost certainly require more of a time commitment on race day than his Street Stock did.

We’ll be at Thunder Road on Opening Day for sure — hopefully it’s a good day for that — and we’ll definitely be at White Mountain on their Opening Day,” Gray said. “Then we’ll probably judge from there. We’ll pick one place to run weekly, and then we’ll hit special shows at the other track. If we choose Thunder Road, we’ll do the 75-lappers at White Mountain. And if we choose White Mountain, we’ll do the Triple Crown races and the Milk Bowl at Thunder Road. We’re not going to do 30 races, I can promise you that, but probably 20-22, somewhere in that range.”

“I think we’re going to have a lot of fun either way,” he concluded. “We’ve got a really good group of guys. I’m excited. Last year we had a really good group of guys, too. That’s the thing — you can’t forget about them. Without Chris Beattie, Nick Benoit, Hunter Garduno, and Willie Holbrook, last year’s championship run would have never happened.”