RPW Exclusive: Halmar Friesen Racing with a strong 3-truck effort at New Hampshire; Friesen falls short of The Chase
RPW EXCLUSIVE COLUMN BY: Stephen Durham/ RACE PRO WEEKLY -LOUDON, NH – For Halmar Friesen Racing, it was the first time for the team to field three trucks in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, and nearly finished all in the top 10.
The disappointment on the day though, Stewart Friesen finished 4th, but ultimately would come up 7 points short of making The Chase.
“The points are what they are. Like I said, we’re trophy racing now and we’ll keep digging the rest of the year and keep building HFR and keep hunting for trophies. We lacked a little bit of speed. We did a 2 tire stop and were able to really maintain there on 2 probably better than I thought. 34 and 38 were the class of the field. They’ve been super fast the last month or so and all these short tracks. So it’s great to be here in the northeast. We have a lot of fans here and a top five, ain’t a bad day. So we’ll take it for what it is. Thanks to Halmar, thanks to all our Northeast Mod Race fans, and we’ll keep digging,” an appreciative Friesen says.
For Mike Christopher Jr. he would have a solid 12th place finish, nearly besting his career best finish a few races ago. Christopher Jr. would overcome technical difficulties with his radio.
“We had no radio, the whole race. It would work sometimes and then it wouldn’t. Like the first stage, I had to reach down to hit the actual radio to talk. So that screwed us up on certain things. I would hear the spotter half the time sporadically across the racetrack. They couldn’t hear me, then they could. That kind of hurt with pit strategy and saying what the car’s doing and all that stuff,” a frustrated Christopher Jr. explains.
Other than the radio issues, Christopher Jr. felt he could have gotten more out of the truck, and wanted to bring home a better finish for the Halmar Friesen Racing team.
“Just overall tight the whole time. I started the race free, they adjusted that, but other than that, I felt like I was just tight the whole time. I just want to do better. I know the truck and I can do better. We just kind of got behind the 8 ball there because we had to pit and change the radio, and that sucks because that didn’t fix it anyways, so we lost all that track position,” Christopher Jr. says.
The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series now takes a few weeks off, and will head to Bristol Motor Speedway on September 17th to kick off The Chase for the Championships.
