After three days, 250 E-Max riders and over 40 classic Mopars ran through the cones at the Hotchkis / Keisler autocross at the Mopars at the Strip show in Las Vegas

Wow, what a weekend! On March 23 – 25, we partnered up with Keisler Engineering to conduct an autocross at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in conjunction with the fantastic Mopars at the Strip car show. It was incredible. Just one year ago at the same show, most Mopar fans didn’t even want to talk about autocross and road course handling, they were squarely focused on drag racing. Then this year with the introduction of the new autocross, the response was overwhelming. 

We were very fortunate to have our friend, national autocross champion Mary Pozzi, on-hand to give rides in our E-Max 1970 Dodge Challenge. Nearly 250 people went for rides with Mary over a three day period, literally wearing out a set of Yokohama Advan Neova tires and plastering grins on dozens of Chrysler fans! 

Show participants also stepped up in a big way to run their own cars, particularly the late-model Mopar crowd. New Challengers and Chargers, Viper coupes and roadsters, even a few Neons and Dodge sport compacts ran the course. By the end of the weekend we had over 40 cars signed up to run, including drag cars on slicks, a few pickup trucks, a rotisserie restored Charger show car and – one of our favorites – a 16 year old in a perfect Panther Pink ‘Cuda her uncle restored for her as a gift right before the show. 

Other Hotchkis team members giving rides included Shannon Hudson from Redline Gauge Works in his recently converted TVS-equipped ’69 Valiant, Elana Scherr in her TVS equipped ’70 big block Challenger and Dan W. in his Hotchkis-equipped ’68 Road Runner. 

Since the track held a heads-up drag race Friday night, we entered both E-Max and Elana’s Challenger, and both cars did very well. In fact, on street legal drag radials Elana’s 440 powered car ran 12.93@101 mph. In previous years when the car had a drag-race suspension setup it ran 12.82 on the same strip, so we were thrilled to report that there was little difference in 1/4-mile performance but a huge

We will have more information on the autocross class winners shortly. In the meantime, enjoy this gallery of Mopars at the Strip Highlights. Special thanks to all of our volunteers, drivers, the Shaffi Keisler and his crew and a huge thank you to Mary Pozzi for being an all-around driving superstar!