Hale Motorsports

Hello Everyone. I’m going to be writing a diary/blog about Hale Motorsports efforts this season. Hopefully, this will be an entertaining source for everyone to follow along with the team throught our various racing efforts this year.

First off, you might be thinking “Who is are these guys?” Hale Motorsports is a race team, and race prep shop, located in Old Saybrook, CT. My name is Eric, and I’m the crew chief at Hale Motorsports. I’m a full time employee who is responsible for making sure everything goes well at the track, and at the shop. I work on the cars, the tools, the transporter, the website, etc.

Randy Hale, the owner, is a whiz at fabrication, welding, building race cars, etc. etc. etc. If it can be made, he knows how to do it. Randy’s father, Randy Sr., is an expert with radios and electronics. Mr. Hale makes sure that we can communicate with each other, and all the bits with electrons run flawlessly. Randy’s wife, Margaret, takes care of all the logistics, hospitality, and accounting. Without her help, we’re all lost.

Now, on to the car stuff…we just finished building 2 new cars for new clients with a new major sponsor. It was a lot of hard work to get the cars done in time for the first test last week at Moroso Motorsports Park in Florida. Randy, the team owner, and I finished packing the trailer Saturday night and drove straight thru with the new transporter to get to Florida by Sunday night so we could test Monday and Tuesday. We slept in shifts and pretty much didn’t stop for any reason other than to fuel up the transporter. We arrived about 2 am Sunday night.

Monday went well, as we had Panoz Race School instructors Charles Espenlaub and Doug Smith, both excellent professional drivers, to help our new drivers get up to speed. Charles has been a good friend to Hale Motorsports, and to myself, for a long time, and we really appreciate his help, yet again. Doug and Charles took the new guys off to do some skid pad work, as well as braking, downshifting, and trail braking excercises. It’s always good to get back to basics when you’ve been out of the car for a while.

On Monday night, the team went out to a fantastic dinner in West Palm Beach. I know that Murphy the Bear is a big fan of French red wines, but I’ll take a premium tequila on the rocks after 4 hours sleep and a day working on brand new race cars anytime. Needless to say, we were all in bed EARLY to catch up on some sleep.

Tuesday was spent lapping Moroso and refining the drivers technique and sorting out the cars. One of our drivers had shown up in his Ferrari 360 Spyder, so Randy and everyone else had to take that out “just to see what it’s like”. My impression: nice car, but the MX-5s were faster…seriously.

The cars ran flawlessly for both days, with only minor adjustments needed, which was really rather nice to see from my perspective, after all the hard work that Randy, Mr. Hale (Randy’s father), and myself put into them.

After the end of testing on Tuesday, we had to leave IMMEDIATELY because Randy needed to be back in the office as soon as possible…so another almost straight thru drive from Florida to Connecticut got us back Wednesday evening.

Well, that covers our first test…right now we’re making some changes to the cars, and awaiting the schedule for the season so we can start planning our travel, etc. Looks like we’re going to do at least one or two more winter tests…I’ll keep you posted.