APR BBQ II – A Gathering of the Faithful

The weather gods smiled down upon the small, sleepy college town of Auburn, Alabama the weekend of March 16th. Perhaps this proves that all good auto enthusiasts do go to heaven?

Nearly 400 people drove from various parts of the country and Canada to attend the second annual APR BBQ to enjoy fine Southern hospitality, fine food, and tour the ever-expanding facility that APR calls home. Nearly twice the number of attendees is estimated compared to last years impressive turnout and as usual APR threw open its doors and gave a fine open house to a power-hungry crowd.

During the weekend there were several highlights:

– APR’s own Chris George asked his then girlfriend Angela Venefro to marry him in a move of bold self confidence in front of over 200 people. Thankfully for Chris she did say “yes.”

– Matt Patton of Atlanta, Georgia drove his new 2002 GTI 1.8t to Auburn and returned the lucky winner of the APR Stage III kit by retaining the lucky lottery ticket. Nearly two dozen other assorted prizes ranging from free APR software to gift subscriptions to Eurotuner Magazine to a set of BFGoodrich tires were given away to various lucky recipients.

– APR was proud to release the latest iteration of their programmable ECMS tuning software known as ECMS2. The major difference in this release besides the ability to create more software programs on the chip is that unlike the previous generation of chip that was visually larger than the stock chip, ECMS2 utilizes a new chip that is almost completely indistinguishable from the stock chip.

Saturday’s open house started at 10:00 with tours of their manufacturing and development facility. Stephen, Brett, and crew led the tours showing how products were developed in house from concept to production mockups using their state-of-the-art CAD design tools, SLA (Stereo Lithography Rapid Prototyping) machine, fuel injection flow test stand, four wheel chassis dyno, and their Fadal CNC Milling Machine.

After lunch there were tech sessions by K&N and Ross-Tech followed by a Question and Answer session by the staff at APR. Wraping it up in the afternoon, the highlight being all the great cars that were parked in APR’s lot as well as the Compton Cattle Company’s lot across the street was indeed a feast for the eyes.

Sunday concluded the weekend of fun and games with drag racing at the Montgomery Motorsports Park with bracket drag racing from 11 till close.

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