R/C Cars Info Page
This page will be paying tribute to one of the gratest drivers ever: Dale Earnhardt, unfortunately gone on 02/18/2001 at the Daytona 500. May the Man Up Above have a "special place in the grid" for The Man in Black up there.
When I first started this page, I intended to report some of my (little) experience in R/C Car Racing, but nowadays I noticed that there is a huge audience out there who do not have a clue on what I am talking about, so I decided to make a small introduction to our hobby.
Notice that I used the word hobby; when you talk about radio-controlled cars to an uninformed person, generally they think of Nikko or Tyco cars, the sort you can see at the shopping mall. We like to think of our activity as a hobby, because it involves much more than just opening a box, dropping in a couple of AA batteries and hit the On button. No, this is about hobby-related skills, such as building and panting, and having a good set of tools and equipment and being proficient in their use. Just remember that a car may have up to 400 different parts!
Most of the radio-controlled cars are sold in kit form, meaning that most of the times you will purchase a unassembled chassis with an unpainted body, without a motor or engine, no radio, batteries or charger. Some manufacturers sell ARR (Almost-Ready-to Run) cars, with even painted bodies, but this is not the case of competition kits.
There are almost as many kinds and sizes of cars as you can think of. There are electric cars, moved by small electric motors and feeded by rechargeable batteries. They are quick, light, clean and almost completely silent. And there's the internal combustion engine-powered cars; these are powered by tiny engines, which are way more powerful (but not necessarily faster) than their electric counterparts, but they are noisy and not that clean.
R/C Cars also can be classified as On-Road or Off-Road, by the type of terrain they are supposed to be run on. Also, there is the subject of scale; a car is generally referred to as 1/10th, 1/8th and so on, depending of its size in relation to the real cars.
Being a fan of auto racing in almost every form, one day I've found out that I could have a little of the emotion associated to auto racing by building R/C scale models. This happened back in 1995, when I was browsing magazines at a newsstand, and run into a copy of Radio Control Car Action magazine, probably the Bible on the subject. I then discovered that I could buy almost everything I needed to build the car at Tower Hobbies, and without leaving the comfort of my chair. I can also dare to recommend Stormer Hobbies; altought I didn't make business with them until today, I can tell that Bob Stormer seems to be a resourceful and nice fellow.
I have chosen to build a replica of a NASCAR auto, mainly because 1) I love NASCAR racing; 2) I think the model would be easier to build and maintain than a F-1 replica (my other passion).
After a while, I managed to assemble my first R/C model, which is a Trinity Street Spec 10 car, a 1/10 scale replica of a NASCAR Ford Thunderbird, as driven by Mark Martin during the 1994 Winston Cup season. It had a Tekin Rebel ESC (Electronic Speed Control), a Trinity Ruby 16-turn electric motor, and Trinity Ex-Tech 1800 Mah Batteries. I used to have a Hitec Challenger 260 pistol, then a Futaba Magnum Junior (2PCKA) pistol radio to (sort of) control it; now I got crazy enough to purchase an Airtronics M8. It's been a while and several kits since I started, and now the roster is like this in the year 2000:
From left to right, the first car is a Street Spec 10 touring car chassis converted to a Formula configuration. How? Get an old chassis, purchase a HPI front/rear F1 wing set, drill a couple of holes on the chassis. It fits perfectly! For the body, any F1/Indycar body from Dahm's will do the trick. With the right paint job, it is undistinguishable from a F1 from HPI or Tamiya (at least from a distance)! The second one is my brand new Yokomo MR4-TC, with a Andy's Stratus body and a Kawada wing in a Ferrari-like paint job; it is powered by a Trinity D3 12-turn hex motor and a Tekin G12 CIII ESC. It is meant to be my primary race car right now, only that our local track has gone out of business, and I didn't have the time to go out of town to race it. The last car is my 'old faithful' Trinity Street Spec 10 in its Daytona '98 winner Goodwrench Service Plus Montecarlo dressing; I also use the original Valvoline Ford Thunderbird shell to race (read about it below). I now got 4 different body shells for it, the last one being a '99 Ford Taurus dressed like Mark Martin's car, using Slixx decals.
The 3rd car is an Associated RC10B2 buggy, converted to a Rally Game configuration as done by the guys of the Radio Control Car Action Magazine. Basically, it is a matter of adapting a front bumper from RPM, a set of Duratrax body posts, Rally Hawgs tires from ProLine and throwing a rally body over it. In this case, it is a Parma Toyota Celica body with Kyosho decals to make it look just like the Sega Rally videogame car. It was a whole lot of fun watching it doing power slides and jumps on the runway at my front door, but I sold it a while ago.
Racing
After just fooling around with my first car for over a year, I was finally convinced by my friends to run a Club race. It was meant for Associated's RC10L cars (and my car is much simpler than those), but they were using handout stock motors, equalizing the field. In my first heat, I took 3rd, displacing 3 10L's; then two 4th places, making it to the A-Main! But by the half of the 2nd heat of the Main, the car started glitching so bad that I caused a horrendous wreck on the back stretch, breaking the front suspension plate as if it were butter sliced with a hot knife! End of the day, but 10th overall, displacing 2 RC10L cars (better than this one!) with more experienced drivers (not too bad for a first timer). At the end of the season, with 3 races completed out of 5, I managed to finish in the 7th position on the series. Again, not too bad for a first timer with the slowest car of the field. Since then, racing became an addiction, and I'm running a series in our local league.
Here you'll find several pictures and a short description of all the cars I have or had in the past; please be patient, it can take little while to load.
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