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0 This past weekend was our annual trip to Orlando, FL for the Performance Racing Industry Tradeshow. Every year we rent massive vans to transport the entire Forged Performance Team to sunny Florida for a weekend of business and pleasure. PRI is the largest performance based trade show in the world and draws attendees from more than 65 Countries. 40,000 people scourer the 700,000 square foot Orange County Convention Center which houses over 3,000 booths filled with the latest advances in racing technology. Every square foot is covered in engine parts, suspension components, data acquisition, safety gear, machining equipment, racing electronics and more! If you are a die-hard motorsports enthusiasts then PRI is your heaven on earth.
This year we left the shop Thursday Morning in twin Ford E-350 15 passenger vans for the 8 hour drive to Orlando. After an 8 hour caravan(no pun intended) we arrived at our hotel and quickly unpacked to meet the local guys from Flat Out Motorsports for dinner. Afterwards we made our way over to Orlando Grand Prix for some friendly, yet competitive go-cart racing. A handful of close races later most of us were ready to get some rest for what was sure to be a extremely active day at PRI.
Friday started out with the entire team meeting in the lobby for a quick complementary breakfast before our adventure around the largest motorsports tradeshow in the world. With all 13 of us piled into a single van we started our drive into the Southside of Orlando for our first day at PRI. After finding an open spot in the massive parking lot surrounding the Convention Center our group finally walked through the front entrance of the show. At this point you truly realized how enormous this event truly is. The numbers of people, venders and square footage on paper is impressive but experiencing it yourself is surreal.
After walking what seemed 100+ miles we gave up on making it through the show in one single day, it just wasn’t going to happen. The quantity and quality of vehicles and parts on display made this event absolutely impossible to take in on a single day. At this point we took note of our location, which would be our starting point the following day, and ended our first day at PRI 2011. We retreated back to our hotel to get ready for a night on the town with our friends Kaizen Tuning. With a Tilted Kilt right across the street from our hotel it only felt right that we started our evening off with dinner and cold drinks being served to us by scantily clad females! The look in their eyes when we walked in and told them we needed a table for 23 was priceless! After a couple tubes of cold beer we were able to get a table large enough for our massive Forged/Kaizen Crew.
After a couple hours of good food, strong drinks, and lots of laughter at TK we decided to take the party else where. After piling into one of our rental E-350′s with our designated race-van driver behind the wheel we transported ourselves to downtown Orlando to check out the bar/club scene. It was agreed that no cameras were allowed past this point but I did manage to get a clip of video around 1am via my trusty Iphone that I think I want to use in my video coverage hehehee….what a night!
Saturday morning came extremely too fast for most of us, and while it was very difficult we did manage to make it the Orange County Convention Center for our second day of PRI. The previous day we had navigated our way through a little over half the gigantic trade show and we were certain that by mid afternoon we conclude our journey.
The vast majority of my time at PRI was spent doing video covering our very interesting and eventful trip to beautiful Orlando Florida so make sure to subscribe to all of our coverage by liking the FORGED PERFORMANCE FACEBOOK PAGE!
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