Team News

Gone Flying with an Indianapolis 500 Winner

By: Kevin Young, flyinggiants.com

June 4, 2010

Gone Flying with an Indianapolis 500 Winner

No matter how much you watch auto racing, you have probably heard the name Juan Pablo Montoya. If not, Juan Pablo Montoya is the Colombian superstar of racing who has met success in every type of car he has ever raced. His bio is full of impressive stats including a Series Championship and an Indianapolis 500 win in the CART series, multiple wins in the Formula 1 series including the famed Monaco G.P. , and Winner of the Rolex 24 hour at Daytona. Juan currently calls the NASCAR series home where he also has had great success including a rookie of the year award and race wins in NASCAR's top two series.

What you may not know about Juan Pablo Montoya is he's an all around cool guy and a fellow r/c pilot whose interests go from aerobatic airplanes, to turbine jets, to helicopters, to foamies. Without the efforts of several companies and individuals I would have never known how much Juan enjoys the hobby, but today I got to find out. Thanks to the efforts of the AMA, NASCAR photographer and friend Ernie Masche, JTEC Radiowave, and Flying Ace's r/c club we were able to arrange some time to go flying with Juan.

Shortly after Joe Nall, Ernie Masche contacted us at JTEC Radiowave about the possibility of bringing some airplanes out to the local Flying Ace's club for a public relations event that the AMA, Showtime Network and a few NASCAR related companies organized with Juan. So of course we said yes, I mean come on we live in the NASCAR capital of the world (Mooresville, NC) and all of us at the shop are auto racing fans. We were not exactly sure about what was going to be involved but we were told that Juan does have a few giant scale airplanes and jets. So what did we do, we went on YouTube and searched for videos of Juan flying to see exactly what kind of pilot he was. After watching a few videos we were comfortable enough letting him loose with a couple of our airplanes.

With the Sprint All Star race and the Coca-Cola 600 races in Charlotte recently most of the drivers were in town and on May 26th we met up with Juan to go flying.

As soon as Juan arrived you could tell he loves r/c and more impressively he knows his stuff. It was really nice to see that Juan is a very down to earth guy just wanted to hang out, fly, and talk about airplanes. So after a warm up flight on a parkzone t-28 we set up my Radiowave 3.2m Extra 300 with the DA-200 in it. I took the airplane off just to make sure everything was trimmed properly and then handed the radio over to Juan and within a few seconds he was going at it, flying some nice lines with some rolls and snaps. Within a couple of minutes and a bump up in the rates he was popping the airplane up and putting it in a hover and doing some knife edge flight. I think my favorite part was the whole time he was flying my airplane, we were talking just like you would if it were one of your friends that you have known forever out on the flight line. Juan seemed to really enjoy himself flying the airplane and kept commenting on how much power the DA-200 had compared to his and how fast the throttle response was on it.

Next we set him up with Former T.O.C. and fellow JTEC Radiowave pilot Jerry Neel, this time Juan flew Jerry's Radiowave 3.2m Extra 300 with the DA-170 on KS1090's. Once again he felt comfortable enough with the airplane to do some aerobatics and have fun with it. After Juan's second flight we had Jerry go back up and put on a demonstration for Juan and all the NASCAR people there and I think it's safe to say that Jerry impressed them a bit with his flying.

After everyone left and we were packing up the airplanes we got a message that Juan had posted a message on his Twitter page that he an awesome morning flying with us and really loved how our airplanes flew. So in all I have to say it was a great experience and I know that there is a whole group of Juan Pablo Montoya fans now.

Again I want to send a big thanks to the AMA, Ernie Masche, JTEC Radiowave, the Showtime Network and everyone involved.