Irwindale, CA (October 21, 2007): Mike Olsen rebounded from a broken rear-end to post an eighth place finish in NASCAR’s Toyota All-Star Showdown at Irwindale Speedway Saturday night. Olsen had to drop to the back of the field for the start of the race after breaking the rear-end in the No. 61 “Little Trees” Chevrolet during qualifying the day before.

“I’m very happy,” said Olsen of the finish. “The car was good - it just wasn’t good enough. I had to use it up quite a bit to come through the field. We probably should have finished a little better than we did, but on that last restart my tires just weren’t ready. They doubled us up and we didn’t have any heat in our tires.”

Olsen struggled to top the practice charts on Friday morning, but was confident for qualifying. His first lap yielded a time of 18.843 seconds (95.526 mph), but the car broke on the second lap. A loud bang was preceded by the loss of power and Olsen had to pull it to the infield. The team stayed late in the night to get the rearend replaced.

“I really wanted to finish the year on a better note than we had at Dover,” Olsen said. “So when that rearend broke I was frustrated to say the least. Then NASCAR wasn’t sure if we were going to be able to change it because it was an impound race, but everything worked out for us.”

Olsen took a provisional starting position to get in the field, but had to drop to the rear for the drop of the green. In the first 100-lap segment, Olsen drove the wheels off the car and made it up to 16th when he pulled down pit road for the first mandatory competition yellow.

“I knew we had a pretty decent car, but by the end of that first 100 laps, I had used up the tires and the brakes pretty good. We had run around the bottom and gained a lot of spots. We came out 16th so that was a pretty good chunk coming from dead last. The only way I could get by them was to go to the bottom. I didn’t think I was making any headway, but the guys told me to just keep doing what I was doing. As it went on, we kept gaining and gaining and gaining,” he said.

After some adjustments, Olsen was on the move again. Following a restart on lap 196, Olsen went three wide from a ninth place position to battle for position and came out in sixth before they threw the yellow for the mandatory second break. When he returned to the track, NASCAR reverted to the last completed lap and lined up Olsen in eighth for the final 50 laps.

Again, Olsen made it up to sixth before a caution lined up the field for a green-white-checkered finish. Before it was over, Olsen dropped back to eighth when he didn’t have as good of a start as he would have liked.

“Considering everything that we went through this weekend, I’m really happy with this. This is a better note to leave the season with for both myself as a driver and for this crew. They worked really hard all season long, and they deserved a top-10. I think we would have had a car to contend with if we could have had a better starting position, but you work with what you got.”