Round 1 of the RC Pro Texas State Series was held this past weekend at Mikeâ™s Hobbies/Gulf Coast Raceway in Houston, TX. The State Series consist of a best 4 out of 5 pointâ™s series with a State Finals to determine the State Champion. Gulf Coast Raceway (which happens to be my home track) is also the venue for the up and coming 2010 1/10 scale fuel Sedan World Championships. A total of 177 entries made it out for Round 1 so the race program would have to move quickly to get through 3 rounds of qualpoint style qualifying plus mains for the one day event.
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Qualifying was close all day and TQ honors would have to be decided in the last round in both Buggy and Arena Truck. I TQâ™ed round one in both buggy and Arena truck but could not manage to get it done in round 2. In buggy it was team mate Roger Ayers who had a near mistake free run to clip me by 1 second and in Arena truck it was also team mate Rocco Margiotta who drove a great heat race to take TQ honors for Round 2. For round 3 I knew I would have to qualify better than Roger and Rocco to be overall TQ so in Arena truck I set out to make a mistake free run and in doing that I ran the only 11 lap qualifier of the day and took TQ for truck. In buggy I set out to do the same and if not for one mistake I would have had another 11 lap run but I did TQ the round and took overall TQ.
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Rocco and I were running the new XRAY XT8 2009 Spec trucks and they were performing very well and it showed for both as we took the top two spots in qualifying and looked very good for the main.
Arena Truck Final:
An early mistake by me allowed Rocco to take the lead and also stretch his lead to 10 seconds over the field. I charged back and caught Rocco but as we went over one of the tougher triples on the track my truck took a hard landing sending me off the track and when I set back down I saw my truck was broken and that was it for me. As for Rocco he comfortably stretched his lead over the field and drove a great race to take the 30 min final and a solid showing for the new truck.
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Arena Truck Final:
1. Rocco Margiotta XRAY XT8
2. Jimmy Matsler
3. Tanner Hagler
4. Chris Rios 5. Courtney Tate XRAY XT8
6. Mark Morrow XRAY XT8
7. Steven Fleuriet
8. Sean Smith
9. Chris Allison
10. George âśT-Mizzâť Drake 11. Jason Branham XRAY XT8
12. Thomas Wells
Buggy Final:
In the Buggy Final I did not want to make the same mistake I made in the truck final so I drove clean and kept my lead from the starting position. I did though get some good racing between Roger Ayers, Jake Dellinger and myself but a clean race allowed me to lead from wire to wire and take home the TQ and the win in Round 1.
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Buggy Final:
1. Jason Branham XRAY XB808
2. Jake Dellinger XRAY XB808
3. Mark Morrow
4. Chris Allison 5. Rocco Margiotta XRAY XB808
6. Courtney Tate XRAY XB808
7. Nathan Vivares
8. Thomas Wells
9. Brian Henn 10. Roger Ayers XRAY XB808
11. Dave Mangelsdorf XRAY XB808
12. Hunter Kinsey XRAY XB808
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Of course in my region with RCAMERICA close by we had a huge showing of XRAY rides out so congratulations to the XRAY team on a strong showing by taking TQ in every round and the win in both classes.
