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12 April 2008 Roseville, Ca. The Western States USAC Sprint Cars returned to All American Speedway in Roseville, California for their debut race of the 2008 season on April 12th. Laura Hayes and her team also returned with a brand new chassis and more confidence after a couple of successful testing sessions.
From the first practice session, Laura was having problems with the left front brake locking up, which in turn caused the car to push up the track. Even with almost full rear brake cranked into it, the fronts continued to lock up. The team thought they had the problem figured out before qualifying but even then, they were still locking up and this slowed the car down considerably. Laura surprisingly still qualified 8th in the 19 car field; after the 8 car invert, Laura would start on pole for the main. Last season, at the Roseville race, the same thing happened and Laura led the first dozen laps and finished a strong 3rd in her first ever sprint car race. She hoped the opportunity would allow her to better last year's effort.
In between qualifying, the heat race, and the main, the team worked nonstop on attempting to fix the brakes. Unfortunately, they never got an opportunity to work on the car's set up for the main. So Laura went out with what she had and soon found it wasn't working very well as the car wouldn't turn and she faded to 8th spot. On an early restart, another driver chose to occupy the same spot Laura and another driver were racing for; Hayes was hit from the left side and thrown into the side of the #17 car. During all of this maylay, the right rear tire was peeled off the rim and the car had to be brought back into the pits on the hook. The team got the tire changed quickly and Laura was back out on the track! The car was now handling even worse due to a mismatch in stagger, but with what she was given, Laura found a line that would work and consistently notched down her lap times to where she was only two tenths off of the leaders. After the 50 laps, Laura had worked her way back up to 8th position. At first this was a little disappointing but after looking over the car and noticed how bent the radius rods and shocks were, and how the torque tube was frozen up, it was actually a good finish!
The next Western States race that Laura will be attending is the May 31st event at All American Speedway. The next race Laura will run is on April 20th at All American with the late model!
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