Bornhorst won two of three at Thornhill Grand Re-Opening Race

0 March 14, 2016, 12:25 p.m.

By Aaron Waldron
LiveRC.com

Race report from Tekno RC:
www.teknorc.com

Joe Bornhorst Wins at Thornhill Grand Re-Opening Race!

Tekno RC Factory Team Driver Joe Bornhorst makes the trip to Hutto, Texas to attend the Grand Re-Opening Race at Thornhill. Joe reports back from the race:

“This week I made the journey to Hutto, Texas for the Grand Re-Opening race at Thornhill. This trip had multiple purposes. To check out and support the new updated facility, test for the upcoming ROAR Nationals that will be held there and also to be able to race with some of the best guys from Texas and surrounding states. Upon arrival on Thursday I was greeted with a pretty awesome update to the facility, a roof that covers the already massive track. Slightly smaller than the original track, it is now the biggest covered track in the world!

Thornhill Racing Circuit, the biggest covered RC track in the world!

For practice day, I had the plan to test tires early on and find the best one, then test some setup things. Since this was the first race after putting the cover on the track, no one really knew what the track was going to do. I started out by trying many different tires so get the best starting point. Once I had that down, I worked on a couple setup things but actually ended up going back to what I had arrived with which was also the same setups that I left DNC with. Other than that it was a pretty normal practice day. I got the track down and got a game plan together for the qualifying on Friday.

Since this was not planned to be as big of a race as it turned out to be, rocket round style qualifying would be used. With this style, you can “go for broke” a little bit more than what you would with the Qual Point system. My game plan was to run a different tire every run to get a better grip on the changing surface. I ended up getting my best run in all three classes in the second round. No real coincidence, I had decent runs in all of the rounds, those just ended up being the fastest. For the last round, I continued my tire testing but started toward the longer wear treads to get an idea for the mains. At the end of the day, I ended up with a triple TQ!

Joe’s tower of power, EB48.3, NT48.3 and NB48.3 vehicles!

Onto the mains. Ebuggy A1 was up first. Again, I ran a different tire that I hadn’t tried yet. It wasn’t perfect but not bad by any means. The track had a pretty slick glaze to it so everyone was just kind of sliding around. I pulled out about a 6 second lead and then on the next to last lap I ran into some traffic issues which ended up costing me the win and lost by a little over a second. The Nitro Truggy main was next. I chose to run a bigger pin tire in this one to make sure the consistency would be there for the entire 30 minutes. The only change that I did make was to go to a Pro-Line lexan wing instead of the normal molded wing. It free’d up my truck which I expected it to and I had a nice uneventful 30 minutes to take the win. Nitro Buggy went pretty much the same as Truggy, I went with a safe tire choice since the track was slick and challenging to get around. My car was extremely easy to drive and I put in a very consistent 30 minutes to take another win. Ebuggy A2 was last up. I got out to a clean start and pulled a slight gap on the field. I made a mistake late in the race and lost the lead for a couple of laps, but I was able to take the lead back and stretch out to a 7 second lead to take the win. Unfortunately with how the tie breaker was set, it didn’t go my way so I ended up second overall for the class.

Nitro/Electric Buggy and Nitro Truggy Podiums:

Overall, I had a very good weekend and got some extremely valuable testing in for the Nationals that will be there in June. Lots of Tekno drivers were in attendance which was very cool to see. We were able to work together and get our cars working nicely, along with a lot of them scoring some good results! A HUGE thanks goes out to Edwin Hartman and his wife Lauren for inviting me into their house for the weekend and giving me all of the hospitality. And also to Edwin for all of his awesome pit work all weekend. It’s a team effort at these nitro races!

Next up for me is about 24 hours at home and then back to the airport to head out to Vegas for the Silver State race. Hopefully we’ll see everyone there!”