Last weekend, July 27-28, we attended the 2nd Annual Intergalactic Electric Championships. It was held at CRC Raceway in Rome NY.

Some of you might remember the CRC Intergalactic Short Course Championships from last year… Well this is that same event, except moved up a little earlier in the season and with a slight name tweak. With the popularity of the 1/8 E-Buggy class growing and the revival of Stadium Truck @ CRC, it made sense to not pigeonhole the event as “short course” centric.

Last year Team Soup showed a ton of support for this event with random awards thru the weekend (Read our coverage of last years event). This year we did the same, giving out our unique awards throughout the weekend. We also sponsored some awards for Top Qualifiers. More on that later.

The event is all electric classes, which is unusual for CRC, since they always have a decent showing of nitro racers. They are hosting 2 Pro Series races this year though, so nitro racers can get their fix at those. Below are the classes that were slated for the weekend.

Classes:

• 2WD Short Course 13.5
• 2WD Short Course Open
• 4WD Short Course Open
• Stadium Truck 13.5
• 1/8 E-Buggy
• 1/8 E-Truggy (cancelled due to low entry)

Total they had 145 entries across the 6 classes. That makes the event bigger than last year, which to me was a little surprising knowing a fair share of locals who didn’t make the trip out. Had they been there I imagine the entry count could have been over 200.

As many of you are well aware, mother nature has not been kind to CNY this summer. Rain, rain, and more rain has been in the forecast every day as long as I can remember. A number of towns have flooded which caused a lot of damage around CNY. Needless to say the past few weeks the track had some rain ruts before the event. The CRC crew busted butt to resurface most of the track and get it smooth as glass before the race though. They did an awesome job.

With that said, let’s move into the actual race coverage. This event was sponsored by a ton of different awesome r/c manufacturers and they awarded door prizes throughout the weekend.

The sponsors were:
Calandra Racing Concepts
CowRC
HRP
Losi
TLR
Horizon Hobby
Dynamite
RC Trim
RC Driver
Team Associated
R/C Speedshop
Genesis R/C Products
and us (RCSoup)

I also want to take this time to thank Thomas Fiske for letting me use a lot of his awesome photography. He took a lot of the following photos. You can friend him on Facebook to see a lot more.

Weekend coverage begins, now!

So Saturday started with setup and practice. The track/store opened at 8AM. You had to sign up before you could practice. Racing eventually started around 1PM. I wish we started earlier, maybe we could have gotten more of the event in (more on this later).

First thing at all big races? Drivers meeting! This is where Frank and crew goes over all safety and other things racers need to do to stay safe and have a good time, while having a smooth flowing event.

With the drivers meeting in the books, it was time to hit the track! Looks like it will be a beautiful day for some racing! Track was awesome!

The Tony’s Pizza food stand was also in the house, keeping racers fed all day without having to leave the track!

Now the Team Soup area. As many know, team driver Jarodd Goedel runs Canalside Racing Products and is a Kal-Gard reseller. We usually ride to the track together so we setup a combined Soup/Canalside booth that Soup intern Kris Button ran and pit in on Saturday. We offered RC Soup shirts for sale, and this was our home base for giving out our awards and decals and such through the weekend.

Here’s a look at our TQ Awards we gave out. They are small insulated snack containers, with a folding spoon in the lid – probably perfect for Soup ;). Inside them were mystery goodies we picked up in the hobby store. Useful items like servo tape, body clips, thread lock, zip ties, deans pigtails, sensor wire, etc, and all topped off with some RCSoup stickers.

Team Soup camp was 4 popups deep, plus the pit trailer from Canalside!

The Brothers Decker representing. Dick and Jim are always great company to be around.

Kevin doing some sort of award tracking.

Matt made the trek from FLORIDA to be here racing with us again! For those unaware, Matt is a NY native who took a new job in January and moved to FL. He missed CRC and the Soup crew so much, he drove 24 hours straight to come race with us. Mad props dude!

If you follow us on Facebook, you probably saw this.. I bet Matt publicly that we’d make 1,000 Likes on our page before a certain date. Our awesome fans shared the hell out of this photo and took us over the mark to lock in Matt’s fate at piloting this beast this weekend. We are true to our word.

Matt brought this basket case with him. It’s a car his cousin dug out of his barn or something and it’s been sitting for like 10 years. Matt changed nothing. Didn’t even dust it off.

Notice it even has dry rotted balloon shock boots! Awesome! Powering it was a Tekin Rebel with some 27T motor. It was pretty slow on the track in Round 1. Matt ran it as you see it. Fresh from the barn.

For Round 2, Matt dropped in a hot 19T motor from Dumper’s Speed Shop. It woke the truck up but was a bit much and the esc seemed to give out. For Round 3, Matt went back to the drawing board and dropped in a 13.5 Ballistic motor and Novak esc to make the truck legal for the class and said it actually drove quite decent considering the how old it is (not even the shock oil was changed).

Kris is here doing surgery on his SC10.

Some random Soup member pics on the drivers stand.

The coverage continues on the next page!