Lou Lazzaro
American Modified racing driver (born 1935)
Louis Lazzaro (January 7, 1935 – May 1, 2000) was an American Modified racing driver. Equally adept on both dirt and asphalt surfaces, he raced from Daytona to Canada and is credited with over 250 feature wins in a career that spanned six decades.
Racing career
Known as "the Monk" to his fans, Lazzaro started racing in 1952 at the Columbia Raceway near Utica, New York, when the driver of a Hobby class car he was crewing refused to help fix the car after a wreck. Lazzaro claimed his first Hobby class feature event win in 1955 at the Brewerton Speedway, New York, and by 1959, had joined with three other friends to field his signature maroon and white Modified, aptly numbered "4".
The quartet garnered their first Modified feature win the next year at Victoria Speedway in Dunnsville, New York. Lazzaro went on to capture the 1962 and 1964 track championships at the venue, and over his career claimed four championships at the Fonda Speedway (New York), three at the Utica-Rome Speedway (Vernon, New York) and one at the Albany-Saratoga Speedway (Malta, New York). The Monk also competed successfully at New York's Orange County Fair Speedway, Syracuse Mile and Weedsport Speedway, along with the Daytona International Speedway, Florida.
Lazzaro suffered a stroke while racing at the Fonda Speedway on April 29, 2000, from which he did not recover. He was inducted into the Eastern Motorsports Press Association Hall of Fame, the New York State Stock Car Association Hall of Fame, and the Northeast Dirt Modified Hall of Fame.
The public source identifies “Lou Lazzaro” as american Modified racing driver (born 1935). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Lazzaro, American and Modified.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q125118092. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 2000, 1952 and 1955.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lou Lazzaro” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.