Photo – Kyle Magda

Bobby Santos made a last-lap pass on Ted Christopher and held off charges from behind to win Saturday’s Sunoco 100.

Santos never won at New Hampshire Motor Speedway until Saturday after a previous best finish of fourth. three times at the Magic Mile.

“I’ve had good cars here and I felt like I had a shot winning here in the past,” Santos said.   “We’ve been good first part of the race and second part of the race, we have the car we wanted then something would happen or we’d missed it the second half of the race.”

The win for the Massachusetts driver ranks high up there in his Whelen Modified Tour career.

“It’s definitely the biggest Modified win of my career,” he added.  “For this team and this is just our Super Bowl and these guys work so hard.  From whatever happens here on out the rest of the season, we won at Loudon so it’s pretty awesome.”

Doug Coby fought his way back from a shock issue in the first half of the race to finish second and almost winning again at Loudon.

“I was ninth and seventh with ten (laps) to go,” Coby said.  “The way the restarts shook out, we ended up a couple good runs and seen myself fourth on the green-white-checkered and kinda hoping Ted (Christopher) would of taken the top and pushed him into the lead and had a nice set-up for the last lap, kind of what Bobby (Santos) had.”

Ted Christopher came home in third and just came up short of his sixth Loudon win.

“For a green-white-checkered, you can think of all the scenarios,” Christopher said.  “It was one of the cars we put together out of our stable we ran years and years ago.  We re-did it and I was pretty happy with it and it’s something we can build on.”

Christopher could taste victory again at Loudon, especially the last few weeks at Riverhead Raceway in New York on June 28 and Friday night in a SK Modified race at Stafford Motor Speedway.

This was the third and tour-leading win of the season for Santos.  The other two wins in 2014 came at Stafford Springs and Waterford.

The Sunoco 100 was part of two days of Whelen Modified Tour racing action, starting with the inaugural Whelen All-Star Shootout on Friday and won by Sprint Cup Series driver Ryan Newman.

The race is on delayed television broadcast on Friday, July 18 at 2 p.m. ET on FOX Sports 1.

Sunoco 100 Top-Ten

1. #44 Bobby Santos

2. #2 Doug Coby

3. #13 Ted Christopher

4. #7 Ryan Newman

5. #16 Ryan Preece

6. #51 Justin Bonsignore

7. #22 Tommy Barrett, Jr.

8. #70 Andy Seuss

9. #6 Ron Silk

10. #12 Chuck Hossfeld