Thanks!

HPI Challenge USA main page | Main World Finals Page | Friday | Concours Challenge | Qualifying | Main Events | Hobby Visions Trade Show | Monday VIP Tour | Thanks!

Many people come together to make each HPI Challenge race a success. The World Finals is a much bigger project because of the number of people that are expected, the distance many people travel to participate, and the expectations of each racer.

One of the biggest helps to make sure this event would take place was the 4 Aces Racing Association of Las Vegas. Rich Taylor and several dedicated 4 Aces club members made sure we had a properly prepared track, pit area and AC power for the racers. Without their help the race basically would never had gotten off the ground and the racers would have shown up to see a dusty, ill-prepared track with no power and no on-site food! Rich also helped us deal with the Clark County Parks department, the local government entity that actually owns the land the track is built on. Club members also helped out by running our fuel tech area, picking up boxes full of prizes and handouts from across town, and many other duties. Without the 4 Aces, we wouldn't have had a successful race!

Making sure the races started off on time, running clean and fair and taking care of all the timing and announcing, Scotty Ernst from Trackside Hobbies in Wisconsin was the voice and frontman of the race during the whole weekend. Fresh from announcing the Tamiya TCS Nationals in Southern California and the IFMAR 1/8 scale World Championships in Ohio, we flew in Scotty to run a professional and fair event. He also did a lot of driving and tracking down of the AMB guys who were at the Hobby Visions show to try and get our missing equipment! Scotty's knowledge of the timing software, skill at resolving track disputes and tremendously enthusiastic announcing made sure everyone was informed, had a good time and raced clean races.

Speaking of the AMB USA guys, we would not have had a real race without their generous help and AMB lap counting system. The transponders, consignment personal transponders, timing detection wire, decoding box and other equipment was invaluable in making sure each racer was correctly scored. We had zero problems with racers not being counted during their races and even convinced some racers to pick up their own AMBrc transponders to use at their home tracks!

Rob Gherman, the organizer of the Hobby Visions trade show, helped us tremendously by giving us contact information for many of the local vendors and hotels who would be able to help us. Without his help the race would have been much more difficult to organize!

Yokohama Tire has been helping the HPI Challenge series for years, starting several years ago with raffle prizes and banners. This year they donated hats, T-shirts, 1/18 scale model cars, Yokohama-licensed Hot Wheels cars, 1/43 scale BMW M3 GT models, racing jackets and even a set of their top of the line street performance tires for a lucky raffle prize winner! Art Smith will be rollin' hard on a set of Parada Spec-2 or AVS tires, courtesy of Yokohama's marketing division. We also had an ample amount of banners and pennant strings to display around the track and make it look more like a full-size car event than a model car race. Thanks to Mark Richter at Yokohama Tire USA, we were able to let all the racers win extremely cool prizes!

The local HobbyTown USA (located at Sahara and Decater) helped us tremendously by providing onsite parts support for the racers. Every racer had an opportunity to purchase extra tires, foams, wheels, bodies and parts at the HobbyTown USA truck that was located in the track's parking lot. Chuck and his dedicated team of employees and store managers also proved invaluable as they helped us store huge shipping boxes full of prizes and trophies.

Riherd's Trophies out of Kentucky again came through like champs, providing our trophy cups and plaques in plenty of time, even though we'd placed yet another rush order through them with little time to spare.

The sales teams at the Alexis Park Resort and Frontier Hotel and Casino also helped out by providing us with many discount rooms for our racers who were traveling from out of town.

Sundog Eyewear donated some of their fashionable sunglasses to the winning racers and HPI crew, it was nice to see the surprise on the winning racers' faces when they saw they'd won sunglasses as well as armfuls of prizes!

We had literally planeloads of racers coming in from all over the United States and the world. Racers came from all over Japan, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. From the US, racers drove or flew in from Texas, New Jersey, Maryland, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, California, Nevada, Illinois and New York. It's dedication like this that makes the HPI Challenge race a success! We truly thank all the racers that attended the race to make it as special as it was. Although everyone else listed on this page helped organize and run this race, without the racers there wouldn't have been a race at all!

Now to concentrate on the HPI staff members that helped make this event possible:

Kent Clausen helped make sure we could have this event. It didn't take too much arm-twisting to make sure we got the best help we could find, and in the end everything ran quite smoothly thanks to his approvals.

Greg Hill of HPI Europe is the coordinator of the HPI Challenge series in Europe and the UK. He arranged all the UK races during the year (and all the races in the UK since 1999) and also helped set up the HPI Challenge programs in all the European countries where there are HPI distributors.

Hitoshi Ishikawa from HPI Japan arranged all the HPI Challenge races in Japan this year, and helped out the Japanese invitational racers while they were in town. He even got to drive a left-hand drive car on the right side of the road for the first time - and not just any car...a fully loaded 15-passenger Ford Clubwagon with a V8! They just don't have anything like that in Japan, but by the end of the weekend Hitoshi was able to muster enough courage to make it from the hotel to the track and back by himself - no caravan required! The next time he visits the US, he'll be street racing or something like that.

Thad Garner and Greg Santos - the hardworking tech inspection staff that took all the hard looks and questions from the racers that came up late, didn't read the rules, didn't have a legal car, forgot their transponders before and after their race, and left their cars on the tech table.

Various people in the Purchasing, Sales, Accounting, Shipping, Research and Development, Marketing, Manufacturing and Customer Service departments also helped tremendously, taking their share of the workload. In the end, every department of the company helped make this event possible!

Frank McKinney (that is me, writing all this) arranged most of the things that went on during the weekend. Without a truly helpful team and supporting staff, the race wouldn't have gone nearly as smooth as it did, or happened at all. Thanks everyone!