Sam leans into the corner at Devil’s Bowl (Patrick Grant Photography)
(Bill W) April 26, 2016 – For Sam Hafertepe Jr. and the Highway 79 Collision Center #15H team, last weekend’s two-night World of Outlaws event at Devil’s Bowl Speedway in Mesquite, Texas started great. After setting quick time, and sweeping his heat and the Dash, the Sunnyvale, Texas driver was doing his best to keep the sweep alive. Unfortunately, the setup on the car didn’t cooperate. He came away with a tenth place finish, however, and this week intends on running with the Outlaws three times. Tonight, the series heads to I-30 Speedway in Little Rock, before heading to the Salina (Oklahoma) Highbanks on Friday and the I-55 Raceway in Pevely, Missouri Saturday.
Things started well in Friday’s program at Devil’s Bowl. “It was really good to get quick time,” says Sam. “We really haven’t run enough 410 stuff this year to consider ourselves a threat for that. You need a real balance with the car. If anything helped, we have a lot of laps around Devil’s Bowl. If you had told me we would have quick time before we went…it wasn’t really one of our goals, but it was nice.”
Sam kept things going in the heat and the Dash. “The way the format is now, it worked really well for us,” he says. “It put us on the pole of the heat and we won that going away. It put us on the pole of the Dash and we won that going away too.”
With the Outlaws, everything needs to be spot on to get the win. “We tightened the car a little bit and it was probably too much,” Sam says of the feature. “The car just felt terrible. We did have an adjuster knob mess up on our left rear shock. That changed the car quite a bit. We had some small errors there that really dialed us way out. We struggled just to hold on to tenth.”
A top ten finish with the Outlaws is nothing to hang your head about, and Sam was excited for Saturday’s finale. “We were really good in hot laps on Saturday,” he says. “We made some minor changes to the car and it seemed we were going in the right direction. I missed my line in qualifying on both laps. I wasn’t running where I should have been running. Ultimately, that meant we were twelfth quick.”
He would finish third in his heat to lock into the feature. “We changed some things around for the heat, and I think we got worse,” says Sam. “We started ninth in the feature. We went back to kind of a generic setup to try and get the balance back. We had been losing the balance the longer we went over the weekend. We were trying to get something to work on the slick and the slicker it got, the worse we got. After a few laps of struggling, I just pulled it in and saved it for another day. Hopefully, we’ll be ready for Little Rock tonight.”
Sam sums up the weekend. “It was a good weekend to start with that turned really bad. It’s a deal where if you don’t run the 410 stuff on a regular basis, you really aren’t up on the changes you need to make for the feature, because you haven’t done it in a while. That’s where we were, and we’ll try to rebound this week with a few more laps under our belt.”
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Sam would like to thank Highway 79 Collision Center, the Sparks Family, Kiebler & Sons Lawn and Landscaping, Keizer Aluminum Wheels and Champion Oil.
Sam leans into the corner at Devil’s Bowl (Patrick Grant Photography)
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