Words by: Patrick Markham

Pics by: Grace Markham and Rustell Markham

Monster Jam came to Chase field, home of the Arizona D-Backs in Phoenix Arizona on January 26, 2008. Franks Hobby House with support from HPI racing was on hand to do R/C car demos. We had a lot of customers and friends on hand to help us out. We ran a demo during the Pit Party which lasted 3 hours before the main show; the crowd of R/C spectators was huge the entire time, at least 3 or 4 people deep around the area at all times! All together there were about 50 R/C cars! The Pit Party demo setup consisted of 3 ramps, small, medium, and extreme and the loop of death. Shayne, Joey, and Troy got some sick air with their customized Baja 5B SS cars, while Patrick, Michael, Tim, Josh, and Phil pulled off some pretty amazing stunts with their HPI Savage X’s, and Hellfire’s as well. We were able to talk to a lot of new people about the R/C hobby along with handing out about 400 HPI and Hot Bodies catalogs in a time period of about 45 minutes! During the R/C demo before the Monster truck show started, we were able to run R/C cars on the entire show floor. We setup the ramps in front of the stacks of cars; Patrick and Michael pulled off some insane jumps over the stacks and cleared the biggest stacks of 5 cars!

The Monster Truck show was great as usual, with 10 trucks competing. Dennis Anderson in GraveDigger took the race win. The freestyle win went to Neil Elliott in Maximum Destruction which did not please the fans; Everyone thought GraveDigger should have taken the win with the huge air and 3 incredible saves from almost completely on its side. But that’s racin’!