GRoNE Racing at LenJet Raceway

 Ashland, Massachusetts  February 25, 2017  Twelve folks attended the recent GRoNE event held at Peter Lentros’ LenJet raceway.  While Peter was hosting the event, he was

actually racing the 1/24 scale New England Retro Race (NERR) next door in Modelville Hobby!  The schedules for the two events overlapped preventing Peter from running in both.  Being one of the principals that started NERR (1/24 scale brass cars) many years ago, it’s great to see how popular it has become.  I’m hoping we can do the same for GRoNE in the coming years!

 

Gravity Race on the Boomerang:

First up were the Gravity cars on the Boomerang Track.  For some reason this track heavily favored the mini-motored cars over their brass panned AFX brethren – not sure

why.  The Boomerang has some really tight turns that tend to favor the AFX cars but it also has some real fast sweepers that the mini-motored cars love – I thought the track would be good for both style cars.  However, for whatever reason, the mini-motored cars were faster – by a lot.  The only AFX die-hard was Ryan Archambault who faithfully stuck with his Doug Morris built AFX car while everyone else abandoned their AFX cars for a mini-motored car – any mini-motored car.  We had 4 anglewinders (two Scott Terry cars and two built by John Reimels), 5 in-lines (four LandSharks and 1 built by John Reimels), 1 sidewinder (a Reimels built clone of Joel Pennington’s design) and Ryan’s AFX brass panned car built by Doug

Morris.  When the dust settled (after all, we are racing in the back of a machine shop…) the anglewinders ruled the day.  In first place was John Reimels in one of his anglewinders followed by Rob Hayes one lap back in his well-tuned Scott Terry car followed another lap in arrears by Mike Resnick driving the second Reimels built anglewinder.  The first non-anglewinder was Mike Tiffany in the lonely sidewinder in fourth followed by Paul Ryer in fifth using the in-line car he built using a LandShark kit.  Three different chassis configurations in the top five separated by only 5 laps – that’s some close racing!

 

	Driver	Yellow	Blue	White	Red	Total
1	John Reimels	21	21	21	20	83
2	Rob Hayes	21	20	21	20	82
3	Mike Resnick	20	21	20	20	81
4	Mike Tiffany	21	20	20	18	79
5	Paul Ryer	19	20	20	19	78
6	Don Hall	18	18	18	19	73
7	Ryan Archambault	19	17	17	19	72.84
8	Paul Crosby	18	18	18	18	72.22
9	Matt Patrick	18	18	16	16	68
10	Tom Gray	17	17	18	15	67
11	Bob Farnsworth	15	17	15	15	62

 

 

ECHORR T-Jets on the Tubbie:

Next up were the ECHORR T-Jet Super Stocks on Peter’s immaculate 5 lane Tubbie track.  This track does not get the usage it deserves (too many tracks – not enough time…  -JR).

I remember running on one of the original tub tracks when I was but a wee-lad growing up on Long Island.  It was located in Hempstead, NY, the home of Aurora – something I didn’t appreciate back then.  But enough reminiscing, on to racing “modern day T-Jets”…   Mike Resnick borrowed a car from Ryan Archambault and proceeded to win the race mainly due to his fantastic run in the red gutter lane.  Mike bettered

everyone by at least two laps in the red lane helping to give him a one lap victory over John Reimels in second.  Third, fourth and fifth all finished on the same lap with Paul Ryer in 3^rd followed by Don Hall in 4th and Ryan (I chose the wrong car) Archambault in 5^th.

 

	Driver	Red	White	Green	Orange	Blue	Total
1	Mike Resnick	32	32	33	32	31	160
2	John Reimels	30	32	33	32	32	159
3	Paul Ryer	27	32	33	29	30	151.09
4	Don Hall	29	29	32	31	30	151.05
5	Ryan Archambault	27	29	32	32	31	151.02
6	Paul Crosby	29	32	31	30	28	150
7	Tom Gray	30	30	30	30	26	146
8	Rob Hayes	30	31	25	30	29	145
9	Matt Patrick	27	29	31	30	27	144
10	Bob Farnsworth	26	32	32	27	25	142
11	Matt Garoian	25	29	31	30	26	141
12	Mike Tiffany	25	27	26	24	22	124

 

 

IROC BRASCARs on the Car Model:

The last race was run IROC style using the original in-line cars that I built over six years ago using the Mabuchi HT50 motors.  These cars have a LOT of miles on them with no major rebuilds – they’re still using the same motors, the same tires (although they’ve been recoated a few times!) and the original bodies.  I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve raced them but it has to be getting close to 30 to 40 times.  Seriously…  Originally we were going to race them on the Parma track but we decided to use the Car Model Engleman

instead.  The cars ran great on this track, and once again everyone seemed to have a blast racing them.  The racing was the closest of the event with Mike Resnick pulling off his second win of the day by 1 section over Rob Hayes – yes, that’s one section not one lap!  John Reimels finished third followed by Ryan Archambault in 4^th and Don Hall in fifth.

	Driver	Yellow	Blue	Orange	Green	White	Red	Total
1	Mike Resnick	39	37	37	36	38	25	212.05
2	Rob Hayes	37	37	36	35	36	31	212.04
3	John Reimels	36	34	36	34	37	31	208
4	Ryan Archambault	34	31	34	33	36	33	201
5	Don Hall	28	33	34	34	34	31	194
6	Mike Tiffany	34	32	35	32	32	26	191
7	Paul Ryer	33	34	30	33	30	30	190
8	Matt Patrick	32	33	34	29	33	28	189
9	Matt Garoian	33	32	31	32	31	27	186

 

 

I want to thank everyone that attended the race, it’s through your support that we’re able to host this style of racing in New England.  I know we’re competing with MARC, the East Coast Outlaws and HOCOC for your racing time and dollars so I really want to express by gratitude to you for making the effort to race with us.  THANK YOU.

 

Our next event will be March 25^th at Rob Hayes’ awesome Catfish International Speedway in Cambridge.  Rob hosted an event in November and he’s graciously agreed to host another this March.  Doors open at 8:00 and, if I know Rob, pie will be served sometime during the event.  We’ll be racing Gravity Cars and ECHORR T-Jets.  If time allows, we’ll also race the IROC In-Lines once again…

 

John Reimels

Brass Car Advocate