OXFORD — The guy with the red hair knows what it’s like to be the one with the red face.

Eddie MacDonald didn’t drag his tire tracks down the invisible TD Bank 250 straightaway of fame without winding up on the other side of the velvet rope.

He experienced the chagrin of a pit road penalty while running up front in 2007; absorbed the worst end of a weather-necessitated “competition yellow” and a finicky set of four new tires after dominating the first half in 2008.

Nobody knows the fine line between a four-time champion, a two-time winner and a no-time lifer better than MacDonald.

So the mild-mannered man from Massachusetts isn’t ashamed to admit that he wouldn’t have ascended a few more feet into the rarefied air of regional racing legends Sunday night at Oxford Plains Speedway without a giant assist from the racing deities.

A flat right front tire at lap 203 was Brad Leighton’s waterloo and MacDonald’s watershed. Leighton bagged $18,900 worth of lap-leader bonus money and a Powerball-sized windfall of heartbreak.

“I’ve been there. He had the car to beat,” MacDonald said.

Leighton, a multi-time NASCAR K&N Pro Series (nee Busch North) champion, once-habitual winner at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, conqueror of every major track in northern New England, still never has won the biggest little race in the country.

His tag team partner in the battle royal with fate now has two in a row and counting.

The unofficial book of racing psychobabble reads that a driver often must lose a race in the process of learning how to win it.

That’s true for MacDonald, but it’s also easy to make the case that winning here 364 days ago taught him how to do it again.

It was Leighton who acquiesced to the cha-chinging in his helmet, ending up with an enhanced fifth-place purse that was just under the posted minimum winner’s share of 25 large.

It was Leighton who had a sneaker go soft while MacDonald nursed the same right front on his machine.

It was Leighton who was primarily responsible for a record pace of 1 hour, 41 minutes, 45 seconds, who reaped a record 189 laps led by a non-winner, who made certain there were a near-record low five cars on the lead lap at the finish.

It was MacDonald winning by a whopping seven-and-a-half seconds and carrying home another trophy tall enough to graze a motor home ceiling.

“Whenever we’d get going, I’d just kind of ride. If I couldn’t get him in five laps, I’d just ride and then get a rhythm going and try to catch him,” MacDonald said. “Once we got a rhythm going it was good. Then unfortunately for him and luckily for us he had problems, and we were able to capitalize on that.”

Nothing teaches a driver restraint like leading a TD Bank 250 longer than some Hollywood marriages and not winning it.

That, plus the experience of standing in last summer’s victory lane, sapped MacDonald’s ego of any need to get out front and pull the parade.

“It’s tough to give up the $100 every 16 seconds,” he said, “but it‘s definitely just awesome to be able to get that last lap.”

MacDonald ruled the last 48 with an iron fist.

Let’s not make the mistake of ascribing this one completely to Lady Luck’s fickle fingertips. MacDonald also would be the first to remind you that his night wasn’t mistake-proof, either.

Cutting a more daring outside swath through the corners than he employed earlier in the race, MacDonald closed to Leighton’s back bumper shortly after the caution flag for Jeff White’s crash on lap 184.

Then he nearly lost it.

“I drove it down into (turn) one pretty hard and slid up. It just got into the marbles. I thought we were going into the dirt for a little bit,” MacDonald said. “Luckily we were able to gather it up. We lost a few spots to the lapped cars, and I had to try and reel Brad back in. Just about the time I was reeling him back in, he had his problems. I think it would have been a heck of a race if that didn’t happen to him.”

Oxford’s almighty record book leaves no space for what-ifs and maybes.

MacDonald is now a two-time champion, putting him in company with Mike Rowe, Dave Dion, Ralph Nason, Geoff Bodine, Ben Rowe, Chuck Bown and Jamie Aube.

Bodine (1980, 1981), Nason (1998, 1999, 2000) and Rowe the Younger (2003, 2004) were the only elite to repeat.

Time for that titanic trio to make room for four-part harmony.

“It definitely is a short list,” MacDonald said. “I never even thought about being on that list, so it’s pretty cool.”

So is he.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected].