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MONDAY opened with Registration: Ah the welcoming day of the convention where traditionally we setup shop and greet friends from all across the country! Most people were able to arrive on this day and received their convention packet with our custom convention program, a dash plaque, badges, shirt & hat! Thanks to Jan Mallinson for once again being there to help with registration!

 Golf with Ron Porter: Ron Porter put together another great location to take our SHO golfers to in charlotte, the Renaissance Park Golf Course, which is basically across the street from the Host Hotel. Tee times found the temps above normal(the norm for the week), but great fun was had by all who participated Thanks Ron for coordinating this!

Monday evening found us at the Reception at Roush-Fenway MotorSports. This was THE place to be if you were part of the SHO Convention on Monday evening, as the Q-Shack helped to provide us an excellent meal! Roush-Fenway helped provide Andrea and Erin who welcome us to NASCAR country, and then took everyone on tours of their main garage! We also were able to sell tickets to help raise money for our charity of the year the Red Cross National Disaster Relief Fund.

TUESDAY started early with many cars being detailed early for the Car SHOw: Our annual car show ended up with around 35 cars and each one was an amazing sight to see! Different paint jobs on both the outside and inside as some took to coating that wonderful V6 manifold in brilliant purple, black, green or yellow! Judging started around 8:30am and was done right at 11am with 15 owners getting gold awards plaques. We also drew to allow FOUR SHO's owners (1 of each generation) premier parking spots in front of the NASCAR Hall of Fame for our group photo in front of the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

All Afternoon was open for time to enjoy the NASCAR Hall of Fame. The SHO Club arranged for a discounted group rate for each adult upon displaying the SHO Club ID badge.

  WEDNESDAY – Track day: VIR (Virginia International Raceway) Every year we include a track day at a nearby track and this year we REALLY worked hard to include Virginia International Raceway! To help avoid the 3 hour drive from the Charlotte hotel, we did have a small group decide to stay onsite at the VIR Resort. Special THANK YOU to those members who helped with tech inspection: Kirk Doucette, Kerby Haltom, Tony Fullone, Chris Archer, Don Mallinson, and others that helped out – apologizies for not remembering!

We want to make sure to say a huge THANK YOU to Doug Lewis of Ford Performance Specialists who sponsored our track lunch everyone to enjoy a nice lunch and save a few dollars in the process!!

A few cars did end up have issues and thankfully we had no injuries throughout the day and our great group of members also helped to make sure everyone got back home safely! A big thank you to those NON-SHO club people who were able to come out and join us for the day and which helped us to cover the costs!

THURSDAY – Our final day started with Drag Racing at Rockingham, NC. The ROCK offers a wonderful 1/4 mile track, about 2 hours from Charlotte. We saw a slightly lower turnout than normal, with 32 cars signing up and only 3 not making it out after our trackday at VIR. We had three groups this year, SHO's, Non-SHO's, and SHO-Haulers, which is for anything that can hook up to a trailer to haul a SHO! Congrats to everyone who made it over to enjoy the day, and another thank you going out to Tony Fullone for their help in making the announcements over the PA something that we like to listen to!

 Thursday closed out with our Annual Convention Banquet: Our traditional convention closing banquet was in the Milan banquet room at the host hotel, where the hotel staff had prepared a rather excellent meal for us to enjoy! The Ford Performance Group helped by providing us with a guest speaker, Lee Holman of Holman-Moody! Ford also sent along some nice give aways which everyone in attendance received when they arrived!

Our top Live Auction item for charity this year was the autographed helmet signed by Roush-Fenway drivers: Matt Kenseth, Carl Edwards, Greg Biffle, David Ragan, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and even the great Jack Roush himself! Along with another fabulous blanket put together with SHO convention shirts by Rosetta Thomas!   Closing out the banquet we of course made our announcement of where next years convention will be and to the delight of those up north, we will be heading up to MinneSHOta!

Special Thank You to EVERYONE who helped make this convention a success: Ford Performance Group, Charlotte Renaissance, Ford Performance Specialists, Lee Holman of Holman-Moody racing, Kirk Doucette and his NESHO crew, TSHOC, and my own family who helped tackle the task of putting on the entire convention!

Next year, we would love for you to make plans to come join us in MinneSHOta for Convention #21 – July 16 thru the 19!

Ken Mallinson- National SHO Club President

CONVENTION STATS Cars-80|People-120|VIR Track Day-45|Drag Race-32