AE Triple-Double at Motorama

0 Feb. 21, 2011, 7:27 a.m.

Motorama has now come and gone. Left in its wake were two pummeled R/C tracks, a few metric tons of dust floating in the air and a pile of trophies in the Team Associated post-race photo.

On the nitro side of the event, Ryan Maifield bagged himself a combo platter of trophies for both truggy and buggy.

In truggy, Ryan battled early on with TQ Billy Easton, but after a couple of mistakes on Easton's part, Maifield was able to pull out about a half lap lead. That proved to be enough for him to hold, as a (mostly) mistake-free second half lead to an easy Maifield victory.

In buggy, Maifield again stretched out an early lead and by the halfway point in the race it seemed as if it would be an easy double-double (Animal Style, of course) for Ryan. However, Maifield's sharpness faded for a brief portion of the race leading to a few bobbles that proved to be enough for Mugen's Taylor Petersen to jump right into the mix. Petersen and Maifield fought hard for a good five minutes and it looked like the race would go down to the wire, with each driver exchanging blows and showing no signs of weakness anywhere on the track. But unfortunately for Taylor, a weakness in his glow plug proved to be the undoing of his stellar performance. Maifield cruised to victory following the TP flameout.

Also running on the nitro side (yet not nitro powered), was the 1/8th E-Buggy class. This class was all about Mugen teammates Travis Amezcua and Taylor Petersen, as the two dominated all weekend. In the main, Peanut and TP battled early on, but Amezcua was able to stretch out a lead about five minutes in and made it stick.

Over in the much quieter electric room, it was the teammates/boss-employer hybrid combo of AE team manager Brent Thielke, and all-world talent Ryan Cavalieri who snatched up the hardware, with Thielke winning Mod Truck and 4WD, and RC winning SCT and 2WD.

The most talked about race of the day for the electric side was by far the 4WD A-Main. With numerous drivers making early mistakes within the first minute or so, Thielke blasted his way to the front of the pack from out of nowhere, and then stayed there. Despite a hard charge from 4WD World Champion Ryan Cavalieri, Brent was able to hang on to the top spot after seemingly being able to make his car the width of a lawn tractor for the last two minutes of the race.

All-in-all, Motorama was a very successful event. With 477 entries on the nitro side, 415 on the electric side, and around 145 rock crawlers, this was most likely the biggest R/C event ever. When you also consider the 372 entries that were racing at Bumps and Jumps Raceway's premiere oval event just down the highway, you can easily assume that at no other point in time has there EVER been so much R/C racing going on within the confines of a single city at once.

This event has the potential to be very, very important. This weekend, we saw things we don't normally see at an R/C race- spectators. And LOTS of them.

This is exactly what the sport could use, and we would like to encourage all the manufacturers out there to seriously research and consider coming to this event. The potential this race (held at this facility in front of that many eyes) has is limitless.

*Side note: LiveRC.com drivers won every class. :)

Here are the final results:

1/8th Expert Buggy

1/8th Expert Truggy

1/8th Electric Buggy

2WD Truck

2WD Short Course

2WD Buggy

4WD Buggy