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?