Holiday Hangover RC Arenacross 2018 event in Moses Lake, Washington

Just two days of being home after Nitro Challenge I embarked on another cross country trip to the great pacific North West to attend the Holiday Hangover event. This event came together in very short notice, but let me tell you I was very impressed with the program put on by Wilde Events. It started off with a 5 practice punch card for each class entered. They ran 1/10th and 1/8th at this event and it was staggered every other for practice. You never had to stand in line, you simply signed up on a sheet of paper for an open heat number, and came up to practice during that run. It was quite awesome to not have to waste time waiting in line to practice! 

The format for racing was pretty standard. Three 5 minute qualifiers in qual point format. They moved through the program of 300 entires very quickly and everything ran smooth. They had a nice novice class also which was good to see. The track was built on Thursday and totally back to how it was originally by Sunday night. Kevin Jelich came up to build the track and he did a great job as it had a nice flow and his signature big air hang time hip jump. 

To start my weekend off on Thursday night I held a 15 participant seminar. It was great to be able to share some of my knowledge of the hobby and help them to improve their program. It was also cool to then talk with them throughout the weekend and continue to help them with their program and follow up with how they were doing. Friday morning we came back to the track and we got about 2.5 hours of open practice/teaching time, where I was able to try their cars or give input or ideas on line choices and driving. Official practice then got underway around 10am.

Qualifying day was on Saturday and it went pretty smoothly. Matt and I were trying lots of things on the E-buggy, things we usually don’t have the time to test and try out. We ran shock on the inside holes on the arms with the stock 4×1.9 pistons and 650/600 oil and Pink/Red spring. Overall it felt pretty good for the conditions which were loose, dusty, and bumpy. I also did some testing for AKA, trying some different patters by utilizing my cutting, trimming, and gluing skills! In all qualifying went good and I was able to TQ every round in Nitro Buggy, Nitro Truggy, and E-buggy. 

As we prepared for main day on Sunday we were given number plates for the a-main. TQ was even given a special red number plate just like motocross! Pretty cool details at this event as mentioned before!

E-buggy would have triple A-mains and be 15 laps each. The nitro buggy and truggy class would each have a 50 lap main which worked out to be about 27-28 minutes in length. So yea, all the mains were done in lap format instead of time which was another cool feature as it harkened to nascar or similar where it’s a lap countdown and possibly makes it more interesting in the end. Overall the mains all went really good for me. I would lead every lap and come away with 3 nice victories for the weekend to finish off the clean sweep. On the final lap of the truggy main I was also able to do a nice backflip for the crowd which felt good as it’s been awhile since I had done one. (Watch around the 26:38 mark)

It was great to finally attend a race in the North West. I have been wanting to get up that way for many years and we were finally able to make it happen. Hopefully it won’t be as long until my next visit. Next up for me is I will be heading to China to the same track as the 1/10th Worlds last year to run some 1/8th buggies nitro and electric. That will be next week so time to get prepared!