CRANDALL, Texas — For the first and only time in 2024, the American Sprint Car Series National Tour is set to invade the Lone Star State.
The quarter-mile RPM Speedway will welcome the series for the first time ever this Friday and Saturday, Oct. 25-26. The third of three-straight weekends of racing for the National Tour marks the final two races on the schedule before the series heads to Oklahoma to wrap up the season in mid-November.
Both nights will conclude with a $4,000-to-win/$400-to-start feature, and the sprint cars will be joined on the card by Limited Modifieds and Factory Stocks on both nights.
Here are the top storylines entering the weekend:
HOMETOWN HERO
RPM Speedway sits about 25 miles southeast of Sunnyvale, Texas, making it the home track on tour for Sam Hafertepe Jr.
The driver of the No. 15H sits 129 points behind Seth Bergman in the championship battle, and with only six races to go in the season, Hafertepe desperately needs a statement weekend at home to give himself a realistic chance at a sixth title entering Oklahoma next month. And if the Drivers championship wasn’t enough to think about, Hill’s Racing Team is also 15 points behind TwoC Racing in a tight battle atop the Owners standings.
Fortunately for Hafertepe, RPM has been good to him in the past. The most recent winged 360 Sprint Car race at the track was an ASCS Gulf South Region event in 2018, and the winner that night was none other than Hafertepe. He finished second in Gulf South action a year prior to give himself a 1.5 average finish in ASCS competition at RPM, and he plans on keeping that number intact this weekend.
CRANDALL KNOW HOW
Hafertepe wasn’t the only current National Tour driver in the field on those two nights though.
Matt Covington finished 10th in 2017 and sixth in 2018 in his only two starts at RPM. He still has plenty to play for even with the Drivers title being out of reach, as the No. 95 team is third in the Owners standings, 51 points behind TwoC Racing. Additionally, Covington has six more chances to avoid going winless on the National Tour in 2024, something he hasn’t done since 2016.
Bergman was also present at the 2017 Gulf South Region race and came home ninth. After a weekend at the World Short Track Challenge in which he never found his footing – finishing 11th on Friday and missing the show on Saturday – Bergman will be looking to get back to his usual consistency this weekend to maintain his triple-digit lead atop the standings.
MIDGET MEMORIES
The top three in the standings may be the only ones with Sprint Car experience at RPM, but a pair of others have competed at the facility before.
Andrew Deal made a pair of trips to Crandall to race with the POWRi West Midgets and scored finishes of 12th in 2016 and sixth in 2017. He’ll look to transfer that knowledge from the small car into the big car as he tries to rebound from a pair of DNQs at Riverside last weekend.
Rookie of the Year leader Hank Davis also has laps around RPM in a midget, with his only visit to the track ending with a seventh-place finish in 2018.
HERE COMES MARTIN
The closest points battle in the top 10 entering RPM is the fight for the final spot in the top five, with Deal leading Jason Martin by 15 points.
The two drivers entered the season with polar-opposite backgrounds – Martin as the defending series champion with two decades of Sprint Car experience under his belt, while Deal is wrapping up his first full season on a national sprint car series.
Martin has been climbing back up the order for much of the season after an injury forced him to miss the Batesville Motor Speedway event, knocking him outside the top 10 in points. His ascent has accelerated in the last few weeks, with his first win of the season at Arrowhead Speedway highlighting a stretch of six-straight top 10s – Martin’s longest of the season.
Following a tough weekend at Riverside, Deal will head to RPM looking for his first top five since Clay County Fair Speedway on Sept. 10. If he can get that done, it would be his first on a quarter-mile bullring since finishing second in the season opener at Super Bee Speedway in April.