WISCASSET, Maine -- All the trips to victory lane, all the track championships, all the winner’s checks he’s cashed at Wiscasset Raceway. For Scott Chubbuck, they just don’t add up.

Ask him what his most vivid memory is from the track he has mastered over and over again, and he’s as blunt as blunt can be.

"Dale Shaw. I’d kill him today," said Chubbuck, referring to a wreck in the infamous Big Dawg 400 held at Wiscasset in the autumn of 2003, one that took him out of contention for a $100,000 payday. "He still won’t come around me."

Given his six track championships – five in a Super Late Model, one in an entry-level division – his two Coastal 200 victories and his added incentive to eradicate the memory of the Big Dawg 400, Chubbuck is among the favorites to win Sunday’s New England Toyota Tundra 250.

The first annual event, with a top-heavy purse structure, guarantees the winner a minimum paycheck of $30,000. It’s precisely the kind of race that gets the attention of Chubbuck and his Hight Motorsports team. The Dresden driver has teamed with car owner Corey Hight of Skowhegan to run a partial schedule the past two seasons, hitting up the most prestigious races with the biggest purses.

Here they stand now, just past the unofficial midway point of the New England racing season, at a track Chubbuck knows as well as – if not better – than anybody else. He said that the secret to being good on the .375-mile oval hasn’t changed much, either,
despite lap times that have slowed by more than half a second in some cases.

"If anything it’s probably handling now more than horsepower, because the track is so beat up and so old," Chubbuck said while taking a break from practice last Saturday at the facility. "It’s pretty much the same. Usually the guys that ran good here (before) are the ones that still end up running good. The track’s getting older and the times are getting slower, but you’ve got to have a good-going car here to win."

Chubbuck’s turned from consummate points racer into a dangerous purse chaser, though he said that a decade ago, when driving for car owner Harold Hinckley, he still went barnstorming on occasion.

"It was a different set of circumstances then, but these (Hight Motorsports) guys now spend just as much money to get there every week no matter what," said Chubbuck, 41. "When I was racing with Hinckley, it was racing more to survive. We’d go to Bangor to race for $2,000 so we’d have the money to go and race again the next week."

The partial schedule this year, Chubbuck said, has been more difficult for the team than it was last year. Still, he was leading a 125-lap PASS North Series race at Wiscasset in June before being spun out of the lead by Kelly Moore, and he finished on the podium at Beech Ridge Motor Speedway in early July to show signs that the team is hitting its stride.

Just in time for the Toyota Tundra 250.

"It’s very important. If I win the race, I can built a garage," Chubbuck said with a laugh. "But really it’s just another big-money paying race, so it’s just another one you want to win. We led plenty of that 400, probably should have won that race and feel like we let one get away, but this is big money. That’s what we’re here for."