USA Race Number One: San Antonio, Texas!

A Texas-size "Thank You" to everyone who attended!

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We'd like to extend a huge thanks to everyone who helped out and participated in our first HPI Challenge USA race of the year! We're off to a great start already, and we hope that every event will be as fun and exciting as our "Lone Star" Challenge race!

About 115 racers attended, and with almost 128 race entries we have to say that we are very satisfied with the kick-start to the HPI Challenge USA series. Everyone walked away happy, some with kits, trophies and entries for our trip to Europe drawing, and everyone got a free HPI hat and free HPI body!

Some racers came from Mexico, all parts of Texas (from El Paso to Houston, Dallas to the Mexican border), Missouri, Louisiana and other places, but the winners of the "longest distance traveled" bragging rights by far were the three guys who came all the way from California just to attend! 24 hours straight of driving will make you crazy, but they were crazy before they hopped in the car to drive to Texas!

The Concours Challenge was again one of the more difficult parts of the weekend, with many great paintjobs and nice cars to look at. However, it was again Ron Meloni and Kaven Mitchell going head-to-head (last year in Houston, Kaven won and Ron had to settle for second). Ronni won it with an impecable paint job and terrific attention to detail! Thanks for making it a tough choice!

Big congratulations have to be handed out to our class winners, too! These guys are each entered into our end of the year drawing for a plane ticket to Europe to race against the best HPI drivers in the world! Here they are, once again posing for the camera:

RS4 Electric Sport winner Tim Kristel	RS4 Electric Pro winner Ron Atomic	Nitro Stock class winner Rusty Wigley	Nitro Modified winner Eric Jones	RS4 Super Nitro Modified winner Tim Kristel

One of the great things about the end of the racing was that nearly all the racers that were left in the pits helped break down the track to make loading the Hobbytown USA trailer easy for the race staff. This is certainly something that helps the staff and makes the day go much quicker after the racing is over!

And last but certainly not least, we have to thank the team of people that made this a truly memorable weekend! Jerry Russell, Clark and Kathy Baisdon, Luis Maldonado, Sr., Kevin Mayse, and Ronnie Meloni all did a great job welcoming HPI into their club, at least for the weekend. Hopefully Kevin can rest easy knowing that Thad and Frank won't be bugging him in the scoring tent!

Thanks everyone, for a terrific and very fun weekend!

Frank McKinney

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