Electric or Nitro, On-Road or Off-Road???

Now that I knew I wanted to get back into RC cars, and this time start racing them, I had to find out what type of racing I wanted to do:

Electric or Nitro?

Off-Road or On-Road?

1/8^th or 1/10^th or 1/12^th scale?

2wd or 4wd?

There are plenty of types and variations of racing in RC and it did look a little too much to work through to start with. Each has its good points, and bad points, but it all depends on what you are looking to get out of it and what gets your inner child’s heart racing by looking cool!

I remembered there being a couple of magazines around when I was making RC cars as a kid, so popped down to WH Smiths to see what was still around. Luckily there were a couple, Radio Control Car Racer and Radio Race Car International, so I picked up a copy of each over a couple of months to read through. I found info on new equipment and racing reports, with Radio Control Car Racer particularly good for equipment information as they include what most of the top guys are running in their race reports. They also both included all types of RC Racing in the magazines, so I could get a view of what was going on in the ones I wanted to look at doing, and I could see how much had changed with RC cars since I had last built and run one. As it turned out, a lot had changed!

The first question, electric or nitro, was easy to answer. Neither my landlord or girlfriend would let me store petrol, or any other flammable liquid, in the block of flats I live in so it was electric for the power system. Also, I thought it would be easy to use plug-and-play electric motors and control units, rather than nitro engines which require running in, carburettors which require fine tuning and the noise makes it difficult to work on the car in the flat.

The second question was a little more tricky to answer. The first couple of cars I had were off-road buggies, but the last few were on-road touring car replicas, so I wasn’t too sure which way I would go. Initially I looked at on-road touring cars, looking at the entry level kits available, their cost, parts levels with hobby shops and reviews in the magazines and online. I also looked at what went into setting the cars up and the equipment needed to run and maintain the car. This is where it started to come apart for on-road for me. I looked at 1/10^th touring and 1/12^th “stock” cars mainly but kept finding myself put off a little by the complexity.

The 1/12^th Stock car style RCs are simple to use, they looked quite nice as they are based on real cars externally and it was a growing scene so there appeared to be plenty of help. This appeared great, but then I realised that eventually I would want to make the next step up which would be into touring cars or pan cars. Both of these require very precise and exact setting-up. There is tyre balancing, tyre shaving, different tyre additives to choose and how to apply them, degrees of change of 0.1mms in setting-up, and many areas that are black-arts. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with this if you are interested in all, but it was daunting to me in its possibilities and not the level I wanted to go into initially. It simply looked to me that to be competitive in Touring Cars I was going to have to spend serious money and spend forever trawling through websites to find out set-up information. There was also another issue to contend with, where was my local track?

SO............. What to Choose???

While looking for my new hobby I thought about when I was growing up and how I had always enjoyed building things, first with Lego (which still holds a place in my heart as I can’t help getting drawn to it when out shopping!) then modelling kits (involving paint ending up everywhere to my mother’s annoyance), then to RC cars (which combined the ability to make something that worked, that could be modified and the ability to personalise).

I had had a couple of RC cars, my first was a Tamiya Grasshopper II, but they were all bought for me and I had limited input in (normally putting on wheels and stickers). I had got into them and enjoyed the thrill of driving them because my best mate’s dad built and bashed RC Cars (electric, nitro, monster trucks, buggies) as a hobby when I was really young and he allowed me and my mate to drive them in the park too (if we were good, otherwise we had to sit in the van and watch).

(Not mine but one found in Google Images)

The last RC car that I bought and built was a Tamiya TA03F Calibra Cliff Touring car. It was IMMENSE!!! I remember the joy of removing all the parts from their bags, reading through the instruction manual, matching the bits up then putting it all together. I painted it as per the box art (very simple as it was just black, everything else was stickers) with one small modification as I had gone to a craft shop and got some letters in a matching font so my name could be where the pro driver’s one was. I still remember the joy of running around outside in the street, weaving around a made up track and trying to avoid scratching the body on a curb after under-steering wide of an imaginary apex.

(Not mine, one still in good condition found in Google Images)

It looked like a real racing car, more specifically, the type I wanted to race when I was a little kid dreaming of being a racing driver myself. It was black, it was low, it had wide wheel arches, it was mean looking and it had that presence that all cool racing cars had (at least in my mind). It was my first, and last, RC Car that I had saved up for, bought, built, sprayed, stickered, personalised and promptly crashed all by myself.

This was it then, I had decided on my new hobby! I was going to start racing RC cars again! But now I had to find out what clubs/tracks there were local to me, whether they were on-road or off-road and which class I wanted to do once I had chosen……………………….

(Also, I had to work out how much it was going to cost and find a good time to break the news to my girlfriend)

SO…… Where to start?

I guess the best place would be the reason for recently looking for a hobby.

A few months ago I began thinking that something was missing from my day to day life (not in a TV Soap dramatically over the top break down type of way), more specifically, that what I was missing was a hobby. So I started thinking about what type of hobby I might want. A possible return to a hobby I had done before? A hobby I knew a little about (or so I thought initially)? A hobby that would involve meeting groups of new people? A hobby that used skills not based on ones learnt at work? But, most importantly, a hobby I almost certainly knew I would enjoy.

I work in a rather generic call centre (nothing like the one on TV), a long way from where I grew up, so almost all my friends are work colleagues. Not all I work with currently, but still they were all met through our joint need for paying the bills. As nice as these friends are it is good to have a wider group of friends where your shared experiences, both good and bad, are not all related to a particular job, company or hell bent demonic boss.

 

Also, everyone needs a release. Something they can do where they are not thinking about work: worried about the latest staffing plans, running scheduling options through the back of your mind, thinking of business buzz words that will sound cool, professional and as if they warrant a pay rise in your yearly appraisal. Therefore I wanted a hobby that required concentration during participation and allowed me to get away from the rest of my world, so that my brain could switch off from work and home issues.

I already read and collect comics (I am happy to call them comics, not hung up on them being called Graphic Novels to sound cool) and try to get to the cinema often, mainly with my girlfriend, to catch movies. But neither of these is particularly social or likely to get me outside much mixing with new people.

Preferably I also wanted something with a slight competitive edge too, as we all like to think we are good at something, even if it is seen as unimportant by others. It is the sense of achievement, confidence and pride in being better, not necessarily better than someone else, but sometimes simply better than yourself before the last time you tried. Making steps forward in a new skill and finding out that you have learnt, progressed and now further forward on the learning curve than you were last month (something that is very much the opposite of office work where you can often feel you’re hitting a brick wall each day).

So I began scratching my brain for hobbies that might interest me………………………