Thornhill Racing Circuit planning big changes ahead of next year's ROAR Nationals

0 Dec. 31, 2015, 1:45 p.m.

By Aaron Waldron
LiveRC.com

From Thornhill Racing Circuit (via Facebook):
www.thornhillrc.com

The 2016 ROAR Fuel Off-Road Nationals will be the second time in three years that Thornhill Racing Circuit in Hutto, TX will host North America's most important nitro off-road race, and TRC owner Chris Allison isn't resting on the success of the facilty's first two and a half years of hosting racers from all around the world.

A couple of weeks ago, Allison announced a number of ambitious plans for "Thornhill Racing Circuit 2.0" on the facility's Facebook page - including the construction of a full-time roof to protect the surface from often-unpredictable Texas weather and creating the world's largest covered RC track - all in the name of elevating what was already one of the planet's premier RC racing destinations.

"Changes and New Things Coming to Thornhill in 2016

As with most things in life, change is happening at Thornhill. With the new year will come new things. I think that most will agree with me that these will all be good things, some might even consider them spectacular.

I started Thornhill a few years ago with the intention of making a race track that would be a destination track. A place that people would long to travel to, making it a unique experience. With a great group of volunteers and the help of the best track builder in the world we created the largest track in North America. We truly did make something special. We then hosted the ROAR nationals in 2014 barely 1 year after the creation of Thornhill. Some consider it to be the best Nationals in many years or even the best ever. For me I got to witness the best two main events I have ever seen in my 28 years of racing. I then realized that I had accomplished my goals, I had done what I wanted to do. After that for a time I had felt a little lost as I didn't have any more goals to acheive with Thornhill. I needed new goals so I thought about what was challenging me the most at Thornhill. It was easy to realize that the weather has been the biggest challenge (no changing that) it was the biggest problem and something had to be done about it. I also realized that I wanted to host more high profile events and to make Thornhill THE go to track. So I came up with these new goals:

Build the largest Covered Offroad track in the world.
Host the 2016 ROAR Nationals.
Make a visit to Thornhill on every rc racers bucket list.
Host future National and world level events.

So to accomplish these goals, some things have to change. The first being to cover the track. You'll be happy to know that I signed the contract to begin construction of a cover starting on Jan 4th 2016. The covered track area will be 120'x200' making it 24,000sqft. that's almost 2500sqft larger than the Padova track which was the largest convered track I could find. It will also have a 20'x75' cover over the existing drivers stand. The eves of the cover will be 18' tall and there will be wind/rain blocks on the sides that will come down to around the 7' level. We will still be using our same dirt and will thankfully never be rained out again!! We plan to also cover the warmup area and the walkway from the pit room to the track. Construction on all of this will take a couple of months and my tentative plan is to open the track back up sometime in March.

There is a Hobby shop coming to Thornhill. It will be in a large office trailer that will be right behind the drivers stand. The hobby shop is called Holligan RC and the owners name is Jerry. He plans to stock racing items for both tracks including tires, wheels, fuel, motors, servos, parts for the most common cars, etc. He plans to have it up and going before the big track opens back up in March.

There will be a couple of private air conditioned pit room's for rent. To start with there is 2 rooms available. One could hold 3 racers and the other could hold up to 6. These pit rooms come with several perks. They will be secure, lockable doors and bars on the windows and doors. They are air conditioned and have a shared private bathroom. The renters will have access to the facility during daylight hours and have access to practice on the tracks during that time. All of this is included in the monthly fee. I would like to rent these out to an individual or a group that knows one another. Contact me if interested. I may add more rooms if interested is high enough.

We plan to start racing every weekend. At first my plan is to run every other weekend on each track. Back and forth each weekend. We'll go to every weekend on both tracks if I can come up with some more help to run the races on days I can't be there. The actual schedule is still being figured out but more racing is a certainty. I am hoping that this will help build back a strong club race presence in Austin.

We also plan to improve the pit room by putting down crushed granite to help with the dust problem. We plan to enlarge the parking areas by putting down more road base. We are going to rearrange the concessions stand area to open the area up more.

All of this plus 4 major races next year, which are: