Hafertepe Wins the 50th Annual Devil’s Bowl Winter Nationals
Bryan Hulbert – MESQUITE, Texas
Fastest in Qualifying, won his Heat Race, earned the Pole in the A-Feature, and never looked back. That’s the way it went Saturday night for Sam Hafertepe, Jr., who etched his name in the record books as the winner of the final A-Feature with the American Sprint Car Series presented by RacinDirt.com at the Devil’s Bowl Speedway.
“We had an awesome racecar tonight,” said Hafertepe. “I was amazed at how good we were, and honestly, on the restarts, I kind of wasn’t going as hard because we’d catch lapped traffic so fast.”
Hafertepe’s ninth win at the half-mile with the American Sprint Car Series presented by RacinDirt.com, the victory is his 65th with the tour.
Giving a tip of the cap to the track crew on getting the surface ironed out and providing multiple grooves of racing, Sam then stated, “It’s sad to see this place go. I’ve spent a lot of my life racing here. I started when I was sixteen years old, and that was 20 years ago, but it’s neat to be a part of this place. It’s impressive for a facility like this to last as long as it has, and it takes people like the Edwards running to make it last all these years.”
Never a challenge over the course of 30 laps, Hafertepe was quick into lapped traffic several times. Slowed for the final time with nine laps to run, Traffic over the final two laps at one point looked like it was going to give Matt Covington a chance at the Hills Racin No. 15h with Hafertepe nearly brought to a standstill in the first and second turns.
Stripping nearly two seconds off of his advantage at the wave of the white flag, Sam found smoothing sailing through the final sets of turns and captured the win by 2.542-seconds.
Matt Covington crossed second, with Howard Moore third.
