The Trinity Snowbirds is one of the biggest and most attended races of the year. The big news so far is that the race has been moved to a new location. This year’s race is happening right now at the Radisson hotel in Kissimmee FL which is not to far from Orlando and Disney World. There’s a lot of pit space in the ball room and the racers are allowed to work on their gear in their rooms. You can watch the race on the TV in your room and that makes it much easier to know what is going on so you don’t miss a race. I’ve heard mixed reviews on the new location. The rooms and hotel are much nicer but some miss the atmosphere that the past location provided.
NASCAR has the Daytona 500 to kick off their season and we start out season off with a bang with the Snowbird nationals. The list of sponsors is mind blowing. Companies such as Trinity, XRAY, Team Associated, and Intellect are just a few in the line up. There are plenty of parts available to the racers. I went over to the Superior Hobbies room to see what was going on and was surprised to see that they converted two rooms into a fully stocked hobby shop.
The track was open on Tuesday and Wednesday for practice. The road course guys ran in the beginning of the day and the oval guys took over the second half of the day and they each ran for ten hours. Round one and two of road course racing was run on Thursday and the oval guys got in round one. Today the road guys ran round three and the oval guys finished up rounds two and three. Each day they started at 6am in the morning and finished up at 1am the next day. On Saturday round four of each will be run along with the B-mains with the day starting at 6am and finishing early at 8pm. Sunday they’ll be finishing up the rest of the mains and they are scheduled to finish up by 6pm.
There’s a manufacturers row setup for people to see new and current products for some of today’s best known companies. It’s a great way to get to know the products and people behind them.
Race Specs
Location; Radisson Resorts Kissimmee; FL
Primary Sponsors; Trinity, XRAY, Team Associated, Intellect
Qualifying; IFMAR style, four rounds
Classes and Top Qualifiers
Road
12th GTP 27T – Jeff Brown
Touring 27T – Travis Schreven
12th GTP Mod – Teemu Leino
Touring 27T rubber – Mike Haynes
Touring 19T foam – Jason Schrefler
Touring Outlaw – Bart Wubben
12th GTP Mod – Jilles Groskamp
Touring mod – Paul Lemieux
Oval
SK – Ken Kerttula
4wd Nas-Truck – Tony Moffre
4cell Sprint Car – Steve Salvas
4cell 12th 19T – Phil Marabella
4cell 19T – Bud Denning
4cell 10.5 – Pete D’Agnolo
4cell 27T – Justin Belfiore
4cell 13.5 – Jamie Hanson
4cell Modified – Pete D’Agnolo
This is just a small portion of the pit space available to the racers. I checked the signup list and I can’t believe how many people are here. There are 16 classes and over 600 cars registered to run in them. That’s insane! You see racers everywhere you go in this place.
Team Trinity’s Jim Deiter is in the house and ready to work on some motors.
Team Novak has Charlie Suangka here to help out their customers. This guy is a working fool and has only ha
d a couple of hours of sleep. I hope he’s careful with his soldering iron.
Team Associated’s Sean Cochran is on the big list of racers at the Snowbirds. This guys is wicked fast.
Check out all that hardware.
How sweet is Superior Hobbies’ setup? This is the sweetest hotel room I ever saw in my life.
Like the new digs?
This is just some of the people hanging out and watching the action at 10:30 at night.
The last day of Qualifying is a few hours of being completed. We now know who managed to get their hands on the TQ spot in all of the road course classes and the TQ spots in oval will be posted late tonight or tomorrow morning. Here’s a list of what we have so far.
Great Planes unveiled its MuchMore lineup at the race, with chargers, power supplies, tire warmers, discharge trays and more. Go here for a closer look.
Team Trinity has this booth set up right next to the track. They have some good deals on their products.
Maxx Amps is here with some new batteries and battery accessories. They are now providing their Lipo packs with hard shell cases and if you have an older pack you can buy a clear plastic shell to put over the pack to protect it from damage. And now they are offering their NiMH packs in matched form for you racers out there.
Hacker Brushless USA is showing their new line of brushless motors. They range from stock, to super stock, to modified.
This is a new 5000mAh Lipo pack from Thunder Power Racing. These packs are ROAR legal and are available through Hacker Brushless USA.
New from Trinity is this sweet new fuel bottle. It’s a large capacity unit that features a screw on lid that Trinity claims won’t leak.
There are some sweet paint jobs at this race.
Sign the paper and you can win a new Spektrum DX3R radio. This is the first big race for this radio and things are going very well.
CRC hopes their new GEN X 10 will revive 1/10 onroad racing. It accepts 200-235mm b
odies, and you can get all the details here.
Frank from CRC also brought their brand new oval car. This thing is so new that it doesn’t even have a name yet. It’s setup for standard gear as well as lipo and brushless.
You spend a lot of time in your pit and when you wait this long in between qualifying, you need to find something to keep you entertained.
Team Trinity/XRAY driver Paul Lemieux took home the big win this weekend in Touring Mod, the biggest class at this years Snowbird Nationals. He entered the race as the class TQ and had no trouble holding the rest of the pro drivers off to take the win.
In the oval classes, Pete D’Agnolo was the big winner with his 4-Cell Mod victory, while Jody Miller won the most-populated oval class, 4-cell stock (all the oval cars ran 4 cells at the ‘Bird).
Congratulations to all the winners at the event. We’ll have more info and photos up soon.
Click here for the OVAL RESULTS
Click here for ON-ROAD RESULTS
Click here for the OFFICIAL SNOWBIRDS SITE
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