USA Race Number Two: Englishtown, New Jersey!
A big "Thanks!" to everyone who attended!
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First of all, WOW! One hundred seventy-two racers! We would have had almost 200 if more people had signed up ahead of time! This is definitely a record to beat, the most racers that we've ever had at a regional event! Our 1999 HPI Challenge World Final had about 220 racers, but that included racers that came from outside the US. The East Coast is definitely HPI-friendly!
We'd like to give a huge thanks to all the people who drove up, flew down, hitchiked and otherwise got to New Jersey from faraway places. We heard about racers coming from Maryland, Virginia, Connecticut, New York (city and state), Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and of course all over New Jersey! One racer who wasn't able to race but was on hand to film some R/C action was Juls, longtime member of our HPI R/C Forum. He came all the way from Australia to travel around the US and took the time and effort to check out our biggest race ever!
We hope everyone had a good time - we gave away nearly every car or truck body that we brought, racers got hats, plenty of decals, some racers got shirts and plenty of racers got plaques and the lucky winners got trophies and an entry into our HPI Challenge World Final drawing at the end of the year!
No large-scale racing event is without its problems, and ours came from the fact that our event was TOO popular - we ran out of 200mm bodies to give to racers, and racers who got in line late for the body giveaway were disappointed at the lack of selection (in some cases, we had only one body style to give away). We will be taking care of the racers who weren't able to get 200mm bodies, their bodies will be on their way to them this week. We tried our best to anticipate how many bodies to bring by instituting a $10 late fee, and although we had 95 racers signed up on Friday, another 80 or so signed up on Saturday! There's just no way to predict how many bodies we would need if half the racers sign up at the last minute. So, for any racers going to our events in the future, please sign up early! That way we can avoid disappointing any racers.
Apart
from the bodies, we had very little complaints about anything - the weekend
ran smoothly and with few bumps and scratches, thanks to the American
Raceway team! Radio impound, transponder handouts, race announcing and
everything else went off without a hitch! Big thanks to Dan Haberman,
Bill Rondeau and Doug Venner, plus the rest of the hobby shop staff and
radio techs.
Our
Concours Challenge top three deserves a big congratulations for making
the judges' job a little TOO difficult! :) Mack deserves a lot of praise
for his work on the CLK DTM body he entered in the competition.
We'd like to thank R/C Car Action and Bob Hastings for coming out to take pictures and do a nice article on the event as well! Without the R/C magazines, we wouldn't be able to let other racers around the nation and the world know about our HPI Challenge races, so we really appreciate their help. Bob brought magazines to give away and took tons of pictures of the racing and the racers!
Big congratulations have to be handed out again 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!
Thanks to all the guys to who showed up in all the classes (plus Rally, Truch and Mini), this weekend was definitely one of the best HPI Challenge weekends we've ever had!
Thanks, everyone, for a great and wonderful weekend!
Frank McKinney
Main Page for this race | Concours Challenge | Check out the racing!
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