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Team Earns Two Wins,
Confident For Saturday Hale Racing had themselves another pretty good night of racing last weekend. However, "pretty good" isn't "excellent." Which is what they're gunning for. Michael Hale was able to drive away from the field in the early going to earn two wins in the night of double-features last Saturday, but as Michael said it himself... "In this class you want to qualify good, start at the back and work your way to the front to earn passing points, unfortunately our qualifying session didn't go too well, so we'll lose some points in the championship race." Michael's qualifying session, as he mentioned above, didn't go quite as well as the team had hoped for. An issue with fuel caused a bad misfire in the engine, and resulted in lack of power. This caused Michael's qualifying time to be lower than usual. With the inverted starts that this class is set up to run (the better the qualifying time, the further back you start), Michael was placed on the front row of both main events. In his first main, he started on the outside row, and by the end of the opening lap he had moved himself out front. The team had fixed their fuel issue and Michael was back to running his average lap times. Just when Michael would begin to pull away from the field, a caution would come out, and bunch things back up. While the cars behind him continued to do battle, Michael consistently pulled away by running steady 15.9, 16.0, 16.1 second elapsed times around the .3/8 mile oval. By the time the checkered flag flew, Michael had almost a half-a-lap lead on the rest of the field. When asked by the public address announcer after the event how he won the race, Michael simply replied with "By starting out front. I knew I had to check out quick because they were going to be coming, and fortunately it worked out. I think it was fortunate that the guys behind me were racing one another, it gave me a chance to earn a good comfortable lead. I think as a team we'd rather get a win coming from the back, but we'll take them when we can, and do our best for the next main." For Michael's second main, he would start on the front row, this time on the inside groove. He set the pace as the green flag fell, and without any cautions throughout the entire 40 lap feature race, he did exactly what he did in the opening feature: ran away with it. By lap 10, Michael had a comfortable lead, and was doing the same thing he did just a few hours earlier in his opening race... running consistent lap times while the racers behind him battled it out for the other top spots. "I just tried to stay consistent, and steady. I knew that if I just kept running 15.9's 16.0's or 16.1's that it was going to take them a while to catch me, I saw my dad signaling me on about how far ahead I was, so I just ran my line," said Michael after the night's event. The checkered came out with Michael holding onto a half-track lead. At night's end the team was pleased with doing what they could, considering the unlucky issue during qualifying. Michael had this to say after his second win of the night: "We knew we'd be starting out front, so we just told ourselves 'We got ourselves in the situation, let's go win 'em, there's nothing else we can do now.' Luckily that's what we did." Although the two wins do look good on the stats sheet, the team lost a position in the point standings and fell to 3rd in the championship race. "We were happy about the wins, but disappointed about the qualifying position that cost us a lot of passing points, we'll just have to do our best to make sure that never happens again," said team and car owner, Red Hale, after last week's event. This Saturday things return to normal with the class running two heat races and then a single feature event. The team had a relatively successful testing session on Wednesday and we hope that things will go well on Saturday as well. As always, we hope you will come out and support the team this 4th of July weekend on Saturday, July 3rd, as we take to the track once more before a week off on the 10th. After taking home two wins, the fan support was great last Saturday. Michael was introduced after each race, and the crowd showed great support. We greatly appreciate that, and hope that you'll do the same for us this Saturday. We'd like to give a special thanks to our great sponsors that came out to support us last Saturday as well. It means a lot to us as a team that you'd take the time to come out and cheer us on. We'll see you on the 3rd!
Story by
Brad Edwards |