April 27, 2025 | Jim Kostinden April 26, 2025 “Up In Smoke” April is the month that two ECO races are held. For the second race of the month and the 9th ECO race event of the 2024-2025 season, the ECO racers headed to Hingham, MA to battle it out on the South Shore Speedway. Paul Ryer was our gracious host for this event, along with his newest family member Zeke. The South Shore Speedway is a 4-lane Max Trax routed track that has a challenging infield section consisting of a couple of tight 180-degree turns and an increasing radius and decreasing radius 90-degree turns. Add in a bus stop on the back straight, an up hill 360-degree “doughnut” turn and a long front straight resulting in a challenging track that rewards a well prepared car that balances speed and handling. With 13 racers in attendance, for the first race we would run the Grand National class. After lunch, the second race consisting of E-Fray cars with NASCAR bodies and the third race, the ECO Magnatraction cars with the popular Fairgrounds bodies would be run in the afternoon. Drivers Meeting After practice, tech and sign-in were completed, Dave Lockwood kicked off the drivers meeting. Just prior to the meeting, Dave was handing out the new ECO T-shirts to the ECO racers. They look great. A big shout out and thank you to Randy for his efforts. Dave mentioned that he spoke with Peter Lentros earlier in the week. Dave said that Peter is in good spirits and that he is in the process of getting treatments to help with the recovery from his medical incident. Also, it was Peter’s birthday a few days ago. On behalf of all the ECO racers, we’d like to wish Peter a (belated) Happy Birthday. We all look forward to seeing Peter at his next race appearance. The date for the May ECO race is still in flux. It is hoped that this will be sorted out in the coming week. The race will not occur before May 17th (original date). Once a new date is set, check the ECO website Schedule and Facebook page for the new date. Paul gave a quick update on magnet racing. The last MARC race for the season will be on May 10th. Paul also mentioned that the 50th anniversary of the Nationals race (aka “Nats”) will be held in Ohio. A number of guys from the MARC club will be attending. Our club treasurer, Jimmy Colligan, provided the club’s financial update. A balance of $1490 was reported. Then a discussion took place about what we can do with this balance. Dave first suggested giving the money back to the paid club members as gift cards to the Lenjet store. Another idea was to donate some of the money to a charity related to stroke recovery or a local food bank. Paul suggested that any ideas, especially charitable organizations, be investigated/vetted by the person recommending such organizations and bring this information to the annual meeting (in July). Other ideas are encouraged. The summer series will once again be held on the third weekend (Saturday) of June, July and August. More information will be provided as we get closer to the summer. Dave announced that sign up for the Havoc has begun. Still only $25!!! I know most of the ECO guys attend, but for those of you who hesitate to attend, I highly recommend attending this event. It is a great 3-days of racing T-jets with a great group of folks, and tons of HO swag. And did I mention, all of this for only 25 bucks. Finally, Paul showed the new commutator cleaning tool from Shane Bartella. The tool is available from Barty’s HO Tools on Facebook. Best Appearing Stop the presses… Terry’s 3-month streak of winning best appearing came to an end! A big congratulations to Matt G. for his 55 Chevy Fairgrounds Magnatraction car. Matt did a beautiful job of applying the candy red and gold paint job on his car. Congratulations Matt! Nice work! On to the races… Grand National The ECO Grand National class provides some of the most realistic looking racing cars in our club. Required to be modeled after a real GN race car from the past, these cars not only look good, but are “fun” to drive with their skinny tires. With 13 racers participating, the spread between 1st place and 13th place was about 15 laps. This resulted in many close races with about a third of the field finishing with 76 laps. Even the battle for the podium positions were very close and determined by sections. When the computer finally announced, “race over”, it was our gracious host, Paul R. taking 1st place with 84 laps/13 sections. In 2nd place, only 5 sections behind Paul was Dave L. with 84 laps/8 sections. The battle for the final podium position, 3rd place, was a hard fought battle between Jim K. and rookie driver Brian W., with Jim taking the final podium spot with 82 laps/8 sections, just squeezing past Brian by 3 sections who had 82 laps/5 sections for 4th place. Rounding out the remaining top half of the field, positions 5th , 6th , and 7th were: 5th Chief 78 laps (Nice race Chief!), 6th Matt G. 76 laps/12 sections (Nice race Matt!), and in a tie for 7th Oh Jimmy 76 laps/5 sections, and Tom G. also with 76 laps/5 sections. Looking at lap times, Dave L. had best lap time for the green, blue, and yellow lanes, while Paul R. had best lap time in the red lane. Also of note, Jim K’s best lap times across all 4 lanes only varied by 17 thousands of a second (17 milliseconds for you engineering geeks)! Talk about consistency. Congratulations to all for a great race! Below are the official results (lap counts and finish positions) for the drivers and best lap times. Race Results Lap Times E-Fray with NASCAR bodies After lunch, delicious pizza from Carmela’s, the 2nd race of the day running the popular E-Fray class with NASCAR bodies took place. Once again, this race came down to a battle between our host, Paul R. and Dave L. This time the positions were reversed with Dave L taking the win after turning an impressive 106 laps. Only a couple of laps behind was Paul in 2nd with 104 laps/15 sections. Also challenging for second was Oh Jimmy who fell short by sections, completing 104 laps/8 sections for 3rd. Of note, Oh Jimmy turned the highest lap total of any heat, burning up the track with 28 laps in the yellow lane to secure his podium position. Rounding out the top half of the field, positions 4th thru 7th were: 4th Jim K. with 103 laps, 5th Pit Stop 99 laps/24 sections, 6th Joe E. 99 laps/13 sections, and 7th Tom G. 98 laps/24 sections. Congratulations to the 4 racers that made it into the “100 lap club”: Dave L., Paul R, Oh Jimmy, and Jim K. Also, there were 5 racers that were only separated by 2 laps, positions 5th through 9th. Oh Jimmy turned fastest lap time with a blistering 6.218 seconds lap in the yellow lane. Dave L. had the fastest lap times in the green and blue lanes. Tom G. had the fastest lap time in the red lane. Again, great racing everyone! Below are the official results (lap counts and finish positions) for the drivers along with best lap times. Race Results Lap Times Magnatraction with Fairgrounds Bodies To put it mildly, the last race of the day was a clinic given by Oh Jimmy. Running his beautiful red Camaro Fairgrounds body with large STP sticker on the hood, Oh Jimmy ran away with this race, taking the win by 3 laps and turning the fastest lap times in all 4 lanes. Oh Jimmy, turned 132 laps for his 1st place win. In 2nd was Dave L. with 129 laps. Rounding out the podium in 3rd place was our host Paul R. with 128 laps. Rounding out the top half of the field, positions 4th thru 6th: 4th Jim K 115 laps, 5th Tom G. 112 laps/11 sections, and 6th Hal 112 laps/9 sections. Of note, 7th place finisher, Terry A, was only 2 sections behind Hal. A very close race for positions 5 thru 7. Out of the 12 racers that participated in this race, 10 turned over 100 laps. Hard luck award goes to Pit Stop who was struggling to get his car to handle through the corners. Perhaps it was that Mercury Cyclone body?? Again, congratulations to everyone for some exciting, close racing! Below are the official results (lap counts and finish positions) and best lap times. Race Results Lap Times Checkered Flag Again, on behalf of all the ECO racers, I would like to thank our gracious host Paul for an outstanding event! I would also like to personally thank Paul for providing the table files of the race results and best lap times that he downloaded from the Trackmate computer and emailed to me. While I had to tweak them a little bit (adding color for the lanes and best lap times, and rearranging some of the positions that the computer did not capture in the correct order) I think this format is much neater and easier to read than the scanned copies of the race results and screen shots of best lap times I have provided in the previous race reports. I’ll need to look into this to see if I can download the same files from the PCs at Lenjet Wow, next race is the final race of the season. Time flies when you are having fun. As previously mentioned, the date has not been confirmed yet. We are scheduled to race at Lenjet running Grand National on the Car Model, E-Frey on the Bear, and Coupes on the tri-Oval. Since the tri-Oval no longer resides at Lenjet, we may be running the Coupes on the Rolling ‘O. A final confirmation for the race date and what the 3rd race will be should occur in the next few weeks. See you next month at the final race of the season!