In sports, there are those who are considered generational talents, men like Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth or Wayne Gretzky. They’re the type of competitors who are so dominant, so skilled, that they are instantly considered among the greatest of all time.
The NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour has seen a few competitors like that. Men like Richie Evans, Mike Stefanik, Reggie Ruggiero, Doug Coby and Ted Christopher rewrote record books and collected trophies like few before or since.
After Saturday night at Martinsville Speedway, that list now includes Justin Bonsignore.
The 36-year-old from Holtsville, New York claimed his fourth NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour championship with a dominant win in the Virginia is for Racing Lovers 200.
MORE: Full results from the Virginia is for Racing Lovers 200
The win, the 45th of his career, moved him past Ruggiero for second on the all-time Modified Tour win list.
Yet Bonsignore, humble despite his place in history, has a hard time admitting he deserves to be mentioned among the greats who came before him.
“Those guys, Teddy, Michael, Reggie, Richie Evans, they are absolute bad asses,” Bonsignore said. “To be around those guys and have my name mentioned with them, I don‘t feel I‘m deserving. Those are the biggest bad asses of our series, and to have my name mentioned with them, it doesn‘t feel right.”
It‘s still a bit surreal for Bonsignore, who not that long ago was simply a weekly racer at New York‘s Riverhead Raceway hoping to find the funding to keep racing for another week.
That‘s where car owner Ken Massa comes in.
Massa met Bonsignore at Riverhead Raceway on Aug. 1, 2009. Bonsignore, then just 21, had managed to scrape together enough money to enter the Modified Tour race that evening at his home track.
He turned that opportunity into a fourth-place finish, beating men like Stefanik, Christopher, Coby, Todd Szegedy, Jamie Tomaino and Donny Lia, all of whom either had already won or would go on to win Modified Tour championships.
Massa saw something in Bonsignore that day, something Bonsignore perhaps didn‘t even see in himself.
After a meeting in the pits and a few phone calls later, Massa was starting a race team that in the years since has won four championships and 45 Modified Tour races, all with Bonsignore as the driver.
With that success has come a friendship and an unbreakable bond, the type formed by a few hardworking people shedding blood, sweat and tears to achieve a dream.
“It hasn‘t always been easy. He never gave up on me, and I never gave up on him,” Bonsignore said. “We‘re best friends. We‘re partners in a business together. He‘s financially changed my life forever with our business.
“He and his wife Janine, they‘re like another father and mother to me. They‘re not old enough, and they get mad that I say that, but they are family-like figures to me because they live 10 minutes away. My parents are 12 hours away. A lot of times when I need advice, I go to them.
“Now I have a family of my own, and they just absolutely love my son and my wife Taylor. They‘re just people you‘re lucky to come across in life, and you just hope to never lose them.”
For a time this season, a fourth Modified Tour championship seemed like an unlikely prospect. An on-track rivalry with defending series champion Ron Silk reached a boiling point on Sept. 14 at Riverhead in the form of contact between the two while battling for the race lead.
As a result of the incident, Bonsignore went from leading the championship by five points to trailing Silk by 10 points with four races left in the season.
Things didn‘t get any better at Monandock Speedway the following weekend. Bonsignore and Silk found each other again, with Bonsignore spinning Silk midway through the race.
Bonsignore finished one spot behind Silk that day, dropping him to 11 points out of the championship lead with three races left.
The team, which is led by crew chief Ryan Stone, refocused. Stone rebuilt one of the team‘s most reliable cars and brought it to Thompson Speedway Motorsports Park on Oct. 13.
They won with Bonsignore leading a race-high 121 laps. They brought the same car to North Wilkesboro Speedway one week later. Again, Bonsignore led the most laps, 130, and won.
Silk, meanwhile, earned finishes of third and 11th. Bonsignore went from 11 points behind to 10 points ahead.
“Nobody gave up,” Bonsignore said. “We were publicly upset with what happened at Riverhead. It‘s racing. I get it. We didn‘t approach Monadnock the way I would have liked. We didn‘t run good, and we decided to show our frustrations and show we were willing to lose it all. I‘m not good at that. It was stupid.
“We finished the car, and three days after Monadnock, we came and tested at North Wilkesboro. The car was just lights out.”
A championship was hardly a forgone conclusion for Bonsignore entering Saturday‘s finale at Martinsville. In each of the last two seasons, the drivers who went on to win the championship were involved in incidents during the finale that could have derailed their seasons.
Bonsignore knew one wrong move, one misstep, would be all it took to cost him a championship and hand Silk his third. So he did everything in his power to control his own destiny.
He started by winning the Mayhew Tools Dominator Pole Award. He took the lead on the opening lap, and other than a mid-race restart following pit stops, he was never passed on track.
The championship was all but clinched with 63 laps left, when Silk limped his No. 16 Modified to the pits with engine trouble. Bonsignore could have backed off, slowed down and just cruised the rest of the way to capture the championship.
That‘s not his style, nor is it his team‘s style. They wanted a grandfather clock.
“I came off (turn) four and saw a silver car on pit road. I keyed the radio and said, ‘I see what‘s on pit road,‘” Bonsignore said. “They were like, ‘Just go win the race.‘”
Bonsignore did that, becoming just the second driver (Doug Coby, 2014) to end the season by winning the final three races on the schedule.
In a single day, Bonsignore won his fourth Modified Tour championship, won his first Martinsville Speedway grandfather clock and moved into second on the all-time series win list.
This is his life. He‘s one of the best Modified Tour drivers ever. And he still has a lot of gas left in the tank.
“This is special. I want to do this until I‘m 50,” Bonsignore said. “If I‘m competitive and I can keep this team together, I think I can do it. We‘re going to try like hell to keep winning races and contending for championships.
“I just want to keep winning races and having fun with my friends.”
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