Tekno RC’s Joe Bornhorst made the trip to South Carolina for The Battle Of The Sikest, a race that involved muddy conditions, TQs, a dash for cash race, wins and Nascar! Report from the race follows:
“This weekend, Tekno teammate Mike Eglberger and I loaded up my truck and headed to South Carolina for Sik Track Design’s first east coast race – The Battle of the Sikest at S&B Raceway. It was an 8.5 hour drive so we took most of Thursday to knock out the road trip.
A fun but technical layout brought to life by Sik Track Designs!
Friday morning we showed up to the track and it was pretty dang wet. It had rained most of the night before so there was definitely some work needed to be done before the cars were going to be able to run. At about 11 am, I got bored and decided to do a mud run. The idea was that by me going out, others might follow and the track would get ran in. In the end, all that it did was give provide a spectacle for 10 minutes and as I cleaned my car for two hours, everyone else went on with their day. Talk about your all-time backfires. hahaha. Bright side, the layout was super fun to drive on so I knew that we would have a good weekend of racing ahead of us. It rained pretty soon after I ran so that basically sealed the deal for practice for the day. We got a group together and went to dinner and headed back to the hotels and got some sleep.
Tekno RC was one of the major sponsors of the event.
Sunday morning we were once again greeted with a very wet track. With how muddy it was, Levi Jackson and the S&B track crew knew that no one was going to volunteer to run the track in, so they came up with a great idea. Have a $300 dash for cash race to get people to go out and break the track in. I wisely decided to stay out of this one and watch from the sidelines haha. After that, they finished the third round and I wrapped up both nitro class TQ’s. We then had a few hours to wrench on our cars and get ready for mains.
Nitro Buggy Podium
Nitro Buggy Triple A Mains:
This race is done a little different, as most of Levi Jackson’s races are. For nitro buggy, we did triple 15-minute mains separated by 5-minute breaks. It was really different from normal but definitely a ton of fun. In A1, I had a good early battle with Evan Vail but after a slight mistake, I got a comfortable lead and kept it clean for the A1 victory. During the 5 minute break between A1 and A2, I decided to use the time to test a different tread pattern that I thought would make my car a bit easier to drive. At the beginning of A2, I got out to a clean start with Cole Ogden right on my bumper. We had a really good battle until about the 10-minute mark when he had an unfortunate issue allowing me to cruise to the win and lock up the overall win for the class!
Nitro Truggy Podium
Nitro Truggy 30 minute main:
This one didn’t exactly go to plan. Right off the start, I made a mistake and went straight to the back of the pack. I put my head down and tried to go as fast as I could to get back to the front. Before the first pit stop, I found myself back in the lead but in a pretty crazy battle with Cole Ogden. We went back and forth for the next 20 minutes, but with about 5 minutes to go I made a costly mistake and sealed the deal. I would end up second for this one. All good though, Cole was going really fast and you can’t win them all.
E-Buggy Podium
Ebuggy main:
Going into this main, I knew that all I really had to do was not mess up and I would be able to grab the win. I had a clean start and only one small unavoidable mistake mid race, but overall had a fun 10 minute run for my second class win of the day.
Joe Bornhorst, Donny Ward Jr and Levi Jackson successfully (?) impersonating Joe… ?
After the mains concluded, we loaded up our stuff and got a group of people together for a good dinner before going back to the hotel for some sleep before heading home on Monday.
With all of my traveling, I get to go a lot of places but never really get to stop and enjoy the non rc related things in all of those places. So on my way home Monday, we were going through Charlotte anyways so I decided to take some time and stop and see some of NASCAR country. We decided to stop at Hendrick Motorsports first and that place was pretty dang cool. We walked through the museum and some of the shops and watched them work on their cars. It was pretty cool because they do a lot of the same things as we do with RC cars, just obviously on a much bigger scale. Next we went to Charlotte Motor Speedway, we couldn’t really see much though. I tried to go through the tunnel into the track but I got stopped by the security guard and was told to turn around. Oh well. haha. Up next we went to meet up for lunch with Scott Speed, followed by going back to his house to play on his iRacing Simulator. I had some stiff competition from Scott since he used to actually race NASCAR, but I tried to hold my own. LOL. Thanks to Scott for letting us hangout for the day, it was definitely fun! At about 6 pm, we had to leave and finish our drive home getting here at about 12:30 am.
All in all, I had a super fun weekend. The track crew busted their butts ALL weekend working on that track to get it dried out for us, so big thanks to them for that. Thanks to David Scott (Red) for letting us pit in his trailer and for all that he does to help out at the races, he’s a life saver! Also thanks to Mike Eglberger for being my travel buddy and pitting for me all weekend. And of course, thanks to all of my sponsors for all that they do for me, I definitely couldn’t get to do the things that I do without their support!
Up next for me is to head out to California to the Pro-Line facility for the annual Gas Champs race, I hope to see everyone there!”