The Backyard – BIGFOOT Open House Ruled
Hey everyone, Happy Friday and welcome to The Backyard!
Last weekend BIGFOOT 4×4 held their 50th Anniversary Open House at their shop in Pacific, MO, and it was an absolute blast.
There was action everywhere. An insane amount of full scale monster trucks showed up, whether it was modern race trucks (various BIGFOOT trucks, High Roller, and Gunslinger), or classic iron (various retired BIGFOOT trucks were on hand, in various states of restoration, as well as other old school monsters).
It was a very muddy day, with intermittent rain taking place, but that didn’t stop the trucks from putting on a show in the mud! I’m soooo glad I didn’t have to help clean-up the trucks afterwards. Power washers were doing work, no doubt!
The grounds were absolutely crawling with monster truck industry legends as well. You had a large collection of BIGFOOT alumni on hand as is usually the case, but various other all-time greats could be found mulling about such as Gary Porter, Army Armstrong, and Mike Welch, just to name a few!
Traxxas had an r/c demonstration area and were selling a limited edition 50th Anniversary 1/10 BIGFOOT that looked very cool.
Most of my day was spent behind the mic and on-track helping Trigger King R/C put on their annual solid axle monster truck race. I believe this is the 11th straight Open House we’ve held an r/c race at, and I think that it’s probably my favorite. Well, ok, second favorite. The first one we did back in 2014, which launched Trigger King, will always hold a special place in my heart.
The Open House r/c race is a unique kind of thing, because time is of the essence. The event goes from 10AM to 3PM and we run a Show-N-Shine competition before the on-track stuff, followed by 3 monster truck racing classes, Retro, Sport Mod, and Pro Mod, along with Freestyle at the end…so things have to happen fast. One of the ways we do this is by limiting entries to 1 per person, per class. Despite that limit, we had over 100 entries spread across the 3 classes, making this the largest vehicle count we’ve ever had for this event! We had drivers from as far east as New Jersey, as far south as Florida and Texas, and as far west as California.
Everyone was on their game, and the day went smooth and we ended on time.
The winners of the event were: Show-N-Shine- Jeremy Bunting : Retro Clod Buster – Jason Ruona : Sport Modified – Cody Ingram : Pro Modified – Scott Harp
For a wonderful photo recap of the event as well as the Scale Giants Hotel Bash that happened the night before Open House, check out the JConcepts album here.
Special thanks to JConcepts for their support of the event, the many r/c drivers that attended and pitched in to help, and the entire BIGFOOT 4×4 crew for having us out!
If you’ve never attended a BIGFOOT Open House before, you need to put it on your list!
OK, that’s it for me this week- until next time, keep it on all 4’s!
