After two heart breaking asphalt events and a pretty successful dirt event, Hale Racing returned to Rocky Mountain Raceways for the second to last points race of the season.  It was pretty safe to assume that the championship was out of reach and the goal now was to hold onto second place.  Hale Racing just about put that spot in the bag after Saturday night.

     No doubt about it, it was another tense night of racing at RMR for Hale Racing.  After some hard luck and championship hopes pretty much diminished, the team was still focused on one thing... success.  And "success" was achieved.  The evening started off a little shaky for the team.  After two practice sessions, things looked pretty good, but when the 3rd one rolled around, it looked like things were going to change for the worse.  After heading out, the team decided to make a tire change and with just a little time left in practice, it was a scurry to get the tires changed as quickly as possible.  In doing so, a spring fell out of the right front as the team lowered the car off the jack.  Apparently the springs wasn't seated in it's spot, and it popped out... but do to the fact everything was being rushed, nobody knew it.  Oh but Michael immediately knew there were problems after heading into turn 1.  He rushed into the pits wondering what was wrong with the car and it wasn't too hard to tell that the front of the car didn't look quite right.  The problem was taken care of, but the final session of practice was lost.  It was time to head into qualifying with what was hopefully a good setup.

     Good indeed.  Number 1 to be exact.  Michael blistered the race track almost diving into the 15.7 bracket on what was a pretty hot day.  So, 1 thing was taken care of.  Heat race time.  "Success" was achieved once more.  Although not victorious, Michael still scored a 2nd place finish and maintained the teams goal of earning as many points as possible.  Then it was on to the big show.  Main event time.  As most of us know, if you qualify good, you start in the back.  If you qualify first, you start in the very back.  What was ahead of Michael?  22 modifieds, some of which occupy some of Utah's very best racecar drivers.  Well, the same goal was in mind... "success."  Michael stayed patient throughout the entire event and picked off drivers left and right, slowly moving his way towards the front of the field.  Being in the stands, I witnessed probably the best pass I've seen Michael make all season long.  The word "beatiful" doesn't even describe it.  "Horrifying" fits the bill though as I'm sure myself, every other Hale Racing fan, and the 3 drivers involved were all holding their breath as Michael made the move.  Check out the video, I can promise you that you won't want to miss it.  No need to really break this baby down as the video covers everything... including a few accidents, luckily not involving Michael.  Michael drove his way into another top 5 finish by taking home 4th place, and with hardly any cautions, really ran out of laps to chase down the front of the field.  "I don't know that I could have passed either of the top 2, I felt like we had something for Jimmy in 3rd, but just didn't have enough time, and I wasn't about to try anything risky that might ruin the night for us.  We scored first overall and held our own in points, and that's really what we wanted, actually needed, to do," said Michael after the nights event.  He summed it up perfectly.  The team achieved the success they were hoping for and kept their position in points, basically wrapping up 2nd place as Michael now holds nearly a 200 point advantage over the 3rd place car of Bryan Wordelman.

     The team will take a week off before the final event on September 6th.  We hope you will all come cheer us on as we finish up the 2008 points season.  Our sponsors and fans were proudly cheering us on last Saturday night, and we can't express how appreciative we are of all of you guys that have stuck by us through this entire season.  We can't wait to see you again on the 6th.  Thank you for your continued support!

     Thanks for stopping by HaleRacing.com.  The video of this event will become available this afternoon.  This will be the highest quality video that Hale Racing has released.  So all you high speed internet junkies out there, don't miss out on this one.  Microsoft recently released some new encoding software and although the event took two and one half hours to encode, the result is amazing.  I didn't have to resize the video at all, and the quality is great.  The best part is that the file size is just as low as the previous videos.  With the release of this new encoding software, this means that in the very near future we at HaleRacing.com will be releasing some races in High Definition.  The quality of this release will now be the standard for our "High Speed" versions of releases.  Our high definition videos will be linked as "High Definition Speed" and will probably require a pretty good connection... that's still to be seen.  Anyways, I will still make a High and Low Speed version available with each event that we release, but they may not be available until after the High Definition version (when that time comes).  This event will be the first available video in our "From The Stands" Video Gallery as well.  I'm trying to round up a lot of old video to make available to the public, but I've definitely hit some speed bumps along the way, so please be patient with me.  I still have 2 or 3 events from RMR that aren't uploaded either, so watch for them as well.  Thanks again for stopping by.

Short article written by Brad Edwards

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