Thank you!
To say that this has been a hectic week would be an understatement. With Importfest 2014 less than a week away I was still fabricating and installing parts on the 3Gs Customs 370z. I had 9 hrs sleep in the last 72 hours leading up to the show. I was clear coating and polishing carbon fibre panels the morning of the show setup day and still needed to clean the car top to bottom, inside and out, it hadn’t been cleaned since last fall when I put it in winter storage. My wife Julie was helping all along and was even sanding carbon fibre panels at 4am thursday night/friday morning.
Lets go back in time a bit. For some reason I had the great idea of entering Tuner Battlergrounds Live at the last minute. The winner would get a trophy and a feature in Performance Autosound Magazine. Getting a car into a magazine has always been a dream of mine so I thought why not try. I didn’t expect to go far because there are some really amazing vehicles at Importfest with many people being sponsored, or belonging to a large team. I am an independent. *Well sort of…
Forward to Monday July 21. Stage 1 for Tuner Battlegrounds Live began with voting beginning at 10am and ending Wednesday July 23 at noon. When 10 o'clock rolled around I noticed my car wasn’t on the Tuner Battlegrounds website as a competitor. I thought to myself that I entered too late to qualify. I sent a message to the organizers and they loaded up my profile shortly after. I was already behind in the votes as the other competitors had a hour and a half advantage.
I decided to start a thread on the370z.com looking for support and the race was on! The competition started off with 17 competitors, only the top 4 people with the most votes would move on to Round 2. After lagging behind for a little bit I asked Trips if there was anything he could do to help. He made my “Help a forum brother realize a dream” thread a Sticky, and gave me his endorsement. That in itself blew me away. After he did that we moved up to second place. In the final hour of Round 1 a couple competitors made an astonishing surge and we finished in 4th with 145 votes, first place had 170 votes. Excellent! Round 2 here we come!
In Round 2 the four competitors were paired up into two battles. Since we finished 4th, we were battling the 1st place winner, another Z… a 350z, he was the one to beat. This is where you guys started to pour it on. Finishing Round 2 with 240 votes to his 150 we move on to the finals!
The other battle was between a 2003 VW GTI and a turbo charged FR-S. The VW guy has major Facebook contacts and was pulling away from the FR-S. Stefano, the FR-S owner, after stopping my house on the way to Importfest suggested teaming up. I agreed and you guys tried your best to help him out. He was very appreciative by the way.
Enter the Finals. Saturday July 26. Voting method changed to texting TUNER2 to a number if you wanted to vote for me and the time to do it was between noon - 10pm. We started in the lead only to quickly drop back. I think we were 40-50 votes down. I thought it was over. I was going to all the booths to get pictures of the booth girls holding my sign with voting information so i could share it on social media to drum up votes, I was asking other competitors, spectators, anyone that took a picture of my car. It was a lot of work! The VW guy was part of a team, they had 30 members voting, and their friends voting, and their friends friends voting, you get the idea. It was going to be difficult to make a come back. But we did make a comeback. Big time! Votes for us were jumping like crazy, eventually you guys broke the system and voting stopped around 9pm. The system was maxed out. It was a blood bath with a final score of 407-293 for the good guys!!!! The score was the highest they have ever seen in competition!!!!
The GaleForce 370z is the 2014 Importfest Tuner Battlergrounds Live Champion!
On top of that I also won top of my class, 2014 Importfest 1st place Baddest Nissan 370z!
Thank you, to everyone who helped. My successes couldn't have happened without the members on this forum. I am grateful to be part of this community and to be able to call it’s members my friends.
TL:DR
You guys rock, thank you for your help, support, and friendship!
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