Castle Hobbies of San Jose, California!
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The weekend of March 11-12 was a busy one at the intersection of Camden and Union in San Jose, CA! The first and third Sundays of each month, Castle Hobbies hosts races on their customized corner of the parking lot using a unique portable track system.
This weekend, however, was the time to be racing at San Jose if you are an HPI car owner! Over 100 racers showed up for a fun-filled weekend of racing!
First Impressions
When
Frank and Thad arrived at Castle Hobbies on Friday evening, co-owner Eric
Vasutin was already setting up the track for the weekend's racing! Several
helpful racers were assembling the portable track system, made up of stacked
2 x 4" lumber pieces that overlapped and were held together with
custom-made pins made from sheet metal and rebar. Jeff Blackburn, a cabinet
maker by trade and racer by hobby, had built a freshly painted timing
loop bridge that looked spectacular, and it even came apart for easy storage!
Check out how full our van was!
Eric
and two other volunteers spent much of the night blowing off the track
with lawn blowers, and were already at the track at 6:30 AM on Saturday
when HPI representatives arrived to set up their area. Several other racers
were already at the track by that time, including Shayne and Team Shu
from the HPI R/C Forum! Other R/C Forum visitors were present many were
racing!
Rally Forum guys DKOV and RallySteve pitted with Frank and Thad, since
they had flown down from Washington state and had no table or chairs!
DKOV also thought to bring his concours-winning RS4 Rally car with him,
and we were lucky enough to get a few shots of the car with its lights
on in the dirt! As the weekend went on, many more regulars from the R/C
Forum showed up to say hi and introduce themselves. W Fok, nitroboy, fon
and others dropped by or were racing.
By 8 AM the space for racers was filled up, and announcements about the parking situation had to be made so the traffic heading to the stores in the shopping center. We also had to make sure that the Nitro and electric classes had separate practice sessions, to lessen the chance of breakage while practicing. This worked out pretty good, and it looks like we'll implement this policy at future HPI Challenge events.
At 11 AM on Saturday, the track was closed and the announcement was made for any cars in the pits to be brought to the track for our first HPI Challenge Concours event for the year 2000!