It was a strong run for the Long Island native, Joey Braun, who made his second career start with the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour this past weekend at Riverhead Raceway.<\/p>\n
Braun previously made a start on the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour in May of 2025 at North Wilkesboro, racing for David Hill, and coming home with an eighth place finish.<\/p>\n
Braun showed speed earlier in the day, topping the practice charts in final practice with the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour.<\/p>\n
In his second career start with the Tour, Braun had a strong run, making his way up to third at one point, but eventually fell back, coming home with a sixth place finish.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought we had a better car than a sixth place car,\u201d Braun said to Short Track Scene. \u201cWe were quick in practice and we rolled out on scuffs for our time trial session and the car didn\u2019t fire off the way I thought it would. I never raced on that American acer tire. I only ran on M20s and 30s the one time last year when I ran the old Hoosier Tour tire at North Wilkesboro.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Braun knew he had his work cut out for him, coming back to a bull-ring with the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought it was a good race, these guys are extremely aggressive,\u201d Braun said. \u201cYou had to use your car up a little bit to get to the front, and when I got to third. I thought the seas started to open up for us and thought we were going to finish there. Then the 51 and Craig Lutz, and I made a little contact with them earlier in the race and they got me back and we wound up finishing sixth, but it was all in all, a good night. It was a great show for our first time together running a tour show with this team and hopefully we got something to build on.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Late in the race, the aggressiveness among the field was growing towards the end of the race, with drivers not shying away to use the bumper.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe aggression level turned up a lot,\u201d Braun said. \u201cThe bumps that they were giving really don\u2019t give the drivers much of an out when you\u2019re passing somebody and someone comes down and wants to try and chop you off or kill your run. You don\u2019t have much of an exit in the corners if racing gets tight. I don\u2019t know what everybody else was feeling, but I felt very on the edge the first few laps after a restart. It just took them a while to fire back off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Braun said he felt he had to be careful no matter what groove he was in.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just very slick on the bottom and they\u2019re slick on the top,\u201d Braun explained. \u201cYou can hang a right rear pretty easily and make a little contact and it just seems like if you rub these guys, they don\u2019t take it too well and when push comes to shove, they get you back 10 times harder. Especially when you got back to like 40 to go in a race. I felt like I was getting hit or hitting somebody every lap, and it was still a ton of fun, and somehow the car wasn\u2019t as beat up as I thought it was. I mean, the front bumper was still straight at the end of the night, so it couldn\u2019t have been that bad.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the last two seasons, Braun had been a regular with the SMART Modified Tour, but earlier this September, parted ways from the Ellis family owned 24 modified.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMy deal was to run full-time this year on the SMART Modified Tour and we weren\u2019t getting the performance that I was getting last year with David Hill\u2019s car,\u201d Braun said. \u201cThe whole point of me leaving David Hill\u2019s car after last year was to get better results. It wasn\u2019t coming through, so we pulled the plug on that a couple weeks ago after Carteret County and switched our gears for this year to run this four car for the rest of the season and joined the Whelen Modified Tour for at least the Riverhead show and possibly Thompson, so we\u2019re working on doing that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Braun was disappointed to step away from the Smart Tour, where expectations were higher for 2026.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a rough year, kind of a rough go,\u201d Braun said. \u201cI haven\u2019t had the greatest equipment down there the last two years and this opportunity came about and it\u2019s a really good car, really good crew chief with Doug Ogiejko and a great owner with Rich Gerbe and hopefully we got something that we could build on and and hopefully I got a good home with the modified going into 2027.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
2026 marks the second season where Braun has been in tour-type modifieds, and he may become a regular in the Northeast next year, and potentially calling Riverhead his Saturday night home again in 2027.<\/p>\n
The combination of Braun and Gerbe has already provided proof that it\u2019s a winning formula, Braun the defending Islip 300 winner from 2025, and won earlier this July at Riverhead piloting the four machine.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never ran weekly tour-type modifieds at Riverhead,\u201d Braun said. \u201cI\u2019ve only ran legend cars there weekly, and then I jumped from that to the SMART Modified Tour with David Hill last year, and ran again down there this year with AmeriFast and the 24 car. I\u2019ve been in the modifieds for a little bit now, not a long time, but we put together a deal up here with Rich Gerbe and Highmark, and we\u2019ve went out four or five times with the car and have won three major races with it, and now we\u2019re really shifting our gears to just running this Highmark car. I\u2019ve been bouncing back and forth the last couple of years, but I\u2019ve really never had a weekly home with a modified.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
With his second Top-10 in just his second start with the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour, it is a confidence boost in the back half of the 2026 season.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year when I ran the Whelen Modified Tour show with David Hill at North Wilkesboro, we finished 7th,\u201d Braun said. \u201cSo far, two Tour starts and two Top-10 finishes. It\u2019s good motivation knowing that I could go against the best of the best and have competitive runs. I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s going to be like that at every racetrack, especially places that I don\u2019t know, but it\u2019s definitely a really good confidence boost, that\u2019s for sure.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Braun is thankful to be back close to home and getting satisfactory results and building momentum heading into 2027.<\/p>\n
\u201cSpecial thanks to Rich Gerbe, Doug Ogiejko, and Highmark, all my crew guys that came out, my parents and everybody that supports me, Pops and G, they\u2019ve done a lot for me in North Carolina and boosted my modified career and hopefully we got a good home and we keep it going and get some good results in the future,\u201d a grateful Braun said.<\/p>\n
Joey Braun and the Rich Gerbe owned Highmark Modified tentatively plan to make the trip to Thompson Speedway for World Series weekend, as the curtain comes down on the 2026 season for the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a strong run for the Long Island native, Joey Braun, who made his second career start…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":856682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[425,99],"class_list":["post-856681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/856682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}