PHOTO: Mark Lamberton says a new confident attitude has him ready for a solid season on the American-Canadian Tour. (Eric LaFleche/VLFPhotos.com photo)
An interview with Vermont Motorsports Magazine Editor Justin St. Louis
Mark Lamberton wasn’t always a great racer, but he was a winner.
In his early days at Airborne Speedway or Malone International, Lamberton was known as much for his on-track pushing and shoving as his checkered flags. Lately, though, it’s been the opposite for the Mooers Forks, N.Y., veteran: He’s clean, he’s fair, and he has the respect of his competitors and officials.
But he hasn’t won a race in almost a decade.
Upon accepting his American-Canadian Tour sportsmanship award at the series post-season banquet in January, Lamberton recited from memory the first words that ACT president Tom Curley ever said to him: “I’ve thrown better drivers out than you’ll ever be.”
Eventually Lamberton grew out of that rough start at Airborne, winning a Flying Tiger championship and graduating to the top-tier Late Model class. By the end of the 1990s he secured his first ACT victory at his home track. Two years later he grabbed two more home-turf wins on the series and another Airborne title.
He made the big jump to full-time touring and was a top-five driver, but just as suddenly as he became a contender he found himself sitting on the sidelines, out of money, out of a ride, and out of options. Lamberton drove a pick-up ride in an open-wheel Modified at Airborne one year and played crew chief the next, all the while coming to the track and wishing for another opportunity in ACT.
In 2009 Lamberton hooked up with Rick Green, an Enosburg, Vt., businessman with a successful trucking company and a historically mid-pack race team. Instantly, if not somewhat surprisingly, Lamberton clicked with Green and driver Joey Becker, and began calling the shots as the team’s crew chief.
That the program improved was not a surprise, but the bond that Lamberton and Becker forged was. Just five years earlier the two gutted out perhaps the most memorable race in ACT Late Model Tour history at the Memorial Day Classic at Thunder Road Int’l Speedbowl in Barre. After trading the lead 13 times in the final 37 laps, the entire house stood on its feet as the checkered flag flew.
Lamberton spun, Becker won.
At that point in time — or at any point since, really — it was Lamberton’s only legitimate shot at winning a race away from his Airborne home, and is a somewhat uncomfortable subject he still deals with and answers questions about.
As the victory elevated Green’s status from hobby car owner to serious racer and boosted Becker’s reputation as an unshakeable driver, Lamberton adopted the unfortunate and unfair image of a choker. A controversial crash with Roger Brown at the same track a year later nearly pushed Lamberton into retirement, and he raced just one more season with ACT before quietly slipping out of sight.
Then along came Green some five years later, and Lamberton’s career was rejuvenated. After working with Becker and making a marked improvement in his weekly program at Thunder Road in 2009, Green offered Lamberton a seat in one of his cars for the following season. He and Becker would share driving and crew chief duties — Becker was to drive weekly at Thunder Road, Lamberton would drive weekends with the traveling ACT circus, and each would be co-crew chief.
The pair responded in its first year with a feature event victory for Becker in Barre and championship top-ten finishes for each driver on their respective schedules. A concentrated effort during the 2010-11 off-season and the increased support of Ontario chassis builder McColl Racing Enterprises has the RGR team poised to play spoiler this summer, and Lamberton got a head start by proving his salt at New Smyrna Speedway in Florida earlier this week.
While drivers like Brian Hoar, Patrick Laperle, Joey Polewarczyk, and Eddie MacDonald grabbed the pre-race headlines, Lamberton flew under the radar. After his performance, though, it’ll be a tall order to find anyone that forgets the 40 year-old this year.
With a “plus/minus” pole position, finishes of fifth and second in the back-to-back 100-lap features, and a narrow third-place finish in the Goodyear Speedweeks Cup championship, Lamberton has made it known that he’s for real. In fact, had he beaten one more car on Monday night, he’d have won the Goodyear title.
Maybe it was unexpected, but the feel-good story of New Smyrna has the very real potential to turn into a feel-good story for the entire year.
I caught up with Lamberton and Green on Monday night at New Smyrna. My plan was to get about 60 seconds of material for a brief post-race story like I do with most drivers, but the moment presented something more. Standing at the edge of a dimly lit technical inspection area with palm branches blowing in the crisp February breeze on the Florida coast, one of the most pure and exciting interviews of my journalistic tenure developed before me.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe I’m over-analyzing an uncharacteristically good weekend for a team that has underachieved for much of its existence.
But I don’t think I am. The spark I saw from Mark Lamberton and Rick Green as they spoke was like nothing I’d seen before. A driver who is twenty-odd years into his career usually doesn’t get excited over a second-place finish, and certainly a team owner who has poured hundreds of thousands of his own dollars into his program over fifteen years doesn’t. It was a rare, special moment, and it gives an indication that maybe there are more of those moments coming this year.
Mark Lamberton, a driver from a tiny town on the Canadian border who came from a tumultuous start and turned into one of the good guys, not only kept pace with stars like Hoar, Polewarczyk, and the rest at New Smyrna, he flat-out beat them two nights in a row.
Now he’s ready to challenge for an ACT championship.
***
VMM: Is this the season of Mark Lamberton?
Mark Lamberton: I think so. I hope so. I think we’re going to have a good season, I really do.
VMM: You’ve credited Mike McColl and MRE with a lot of your success at New Smyrna. Are they going to be with you all year?
ML: I hate to say it, because now everyone’s going to want to go and get his stuff, but yeah.
We learned enough this week to bring with us through the summer, just from working with him and [seeing] how he wants us to do stuff, and I think it’s going to carry through. I’m sure he’ll do a few more races with us this summer. He’s the key to this. He really made us go good.
VMM: How good does it feel to be competitive again?
ML: It’s awesome. It is awesome to start driving forward. [McColl] had me nervous for the first thirty, forty laps. I was like, ‘Man, he’s got me so free right now, I’m not going anywhere.’ Then it just started coming to me, coming to me, coming to me, and it just got better and better. It’s awesome. It’s great.
VMM: Are you guys going to burn Mooers Forks down, or what?
ML: We’re probably going to stay in Florida until Thursday, then we’re headed to Mooers Forks. Yeah, when we get home, more than likely. (laughing)
***
That was the end of the planned interview. After gathering a couple of quick quotes, the tape recorder was shut off and the story was moments from being written. It was then, though, that Lamberton got into the good stuff, and he did so on his own without being asked.
His voice changed, his face changed, the aura of the conversation changed. He became serious and almost quiet, like he had a secret he wanted only a few people to know. As he spoke, a crowd of eight to ten people huddled in to listen.
Lamberton spoke of how important his team’s off-season focus has been, and how he’s making his own changes. He said he’s now eating better, drinking less, has started running and exercising, and that he wants to be in better physical condition by the time the racing season starts in mid-April.
He said that the mindset of the driver and team is one of the most important parts of racing, and that RGR has seen vast improvement in that regard, especially with McColl’s help. In the past, the team may have fallen victim to negative thinking, beating themselves in the pits or the garage before the car ever saw the track.
With Lamberton’s permission, the tape recorder came back on.
***
ML: A lot of times we get thinking that we’ve got geometry issues. There’s something wrong, the car’s not right, there’s got to be something wrong with the car because we know everything about setups [and] we should be able to just go out and race with Brian [Hoar] and these guys. We get to the race track and we can’t get it done. All of sudden you get a chassis builder here that knows what he’s doing. We didn’t do nothing major, a few tweaks here and there, it wasn’t nothing big.
Rick Green: The car went good.
VMM: Is it a confidence thing?
ML: A lot of it is a confidence deal.
RG: Confidence is very big.
ML: All I had to this weekend was get in the car, come in and tell him what the car was doing. I wasn’t. The first practice I got out, I told him, ‘Yeah, it’s a little free here, I think we need to do this or that.’
He just kind of shook his head and said, ‘No. Do me a favor — just tell me what the car is doing and I’ll fix it. You drive it and I’ll fix it.’
RG: Shut up and drive.
VMM: Shut up and drive.
ML: Yeah, pretty much, that’s what he said. And it works.
VMM: Is this the first time you’ve been able to do that? You’ve been a crew chief for the last five years, and that’s always been your role even when you’re driving.
ML: Pretty much. I’ve had a few guys that have helped me here and there. I had a kid that helped me a few years ago and we lost him, so I’ve pretty much been it. A lot of us [drivers in ACT] pretty much make all the calls ourselves. Try to drive the car and make the calls, and you get wore out before the race even starts. It’s a big key.
RG: I’m just tickled we came to Florida and came away with two great finishes. It’s a wicked confidence builder for me to have him go and drive by the 37 (Hoar) last night and drive by the 97 (Polewarczyk) tonight. That just tells me where our program is from last year to this year. We didn’t drive by because they were slow, we drove by because we were better.
That’s just all the hard work these guys do, him and Joey. They work real good together.
ML: Yeah, I’ve got to give a lot of that credit to Joey, too. Joey Becker has done a hell of a good job for us.
RG: Becker’s a hell of a guy.
ML: He works hard at it.
***
Becker has been driving for Green since the middle of the 2003 season. Green formed his team in the late 1990s, racing Tiger Sportsman cars with driver Dave Wilcox. After a handful of Tiger victories at Airborne and Thunder Road, Green built top-shelf Late Model equipment and brought Wilcox with him.
Their crowning achievement was a victory in ACT’s former all-star race, the Remington Shootout at Airborne in April 2003, but the relationship soured and Wilcox left the team soon after. Green received more than a dozen submissions from accomplished drivers looking for a ride and — after driving the car himself once — settled on Becker, who had never driven a Late Model before and brought no sponsorship money.
Becker finished second at Airborne on his first night in the car and wrapped up Rookie of the Year honors at Thunder Road despite missing the first month of racing. Since joining the team, Becker has four feature wins at Thunder Road including one last July.
As a chassis builder, Becker also owns countless wins and a pocketful of championships in the Tiger Sportsman division. With McColl’s advice, Becker is in the process of building a new Late Model chassis for Green, and will again race weekly at Thunder Road.
***
VMM: Does this success at New Smyrna transfer over to the Thunder Road program, too?
ML: Yeah it does.
RG: Absolutely.
ML: That’s one of the biggest things we do. Whatever I do, Becker knows, and whatever Becker does, I know.
RG: They talk and they work, and Becker’s here working his tail off all weekend for [Lamberton], and [Lamberton] will do the same thing on Thursday nights for [Becker], and it’s a good deal. I don’t know how this all came about, but with these two guys and these two cars it’s a good deal. It’s a lot of fun right now.
VMM: Do you ever think back to 2004 on Memorial Day and say, ‘How did we get here?’
ML: Oh yeah, a lot of times. (laughing)
RG: One of the first conversations we had in my shop was joking about it, and he goes, ‘Well you know, Becker spun me on Memorial Day.’ So they hashed it out a little bit and we have a blast with it.(laughing)We’ve got a big picture of that in our shop of Lamberton going around and Becker winning the race.
ML: I get reminded of that non-stop.
VMM: Are you ever going to repay the favor?
RG: Probably not.
ML: Not on purpose.
RG: They get along good. They could race right now for a hundred laps side-by-side, and if something happened, it’d be, ‘So what?’ It’s a good deal right now.
