Where to go?????

From my last post, you can probably tell that I had pretty much decided on Off-Road rather than On-Road, but there was 1 final factor that could change everything....... Where were my local clubs????
If my local tracks were all On-Road, then this would ultimately be the deciding factor as a significant reason for trying RC Racing again was wanting a regular hobby nearby to where I lived.
I started off looking at the BRCA (British Radio Car Association) website http://www.brca.org/
They have a list of all the affiliated clubs that can be searched by area so I looked for the North East of England to see who ran what and where.

There were a couple of On-Road clubs, the main 3 being Teeside (which is a fair trek from me t o be doing each week), Barley Mow which is only across the river Tyne, but this is only indoor mainly for 1/12th scale and finally Tyne Met College which is also indoor in a college sports hall. Luckily there were also a couple of Off-Road clubs, Dynamix in Gateshead and NEAM-Seaham (linked to the right). I had a look on Google to see if there were others and I came across oOple http://www.oople.com/rc/ which is a forum website where pretty much ALL of the UK RC scene appear to go. On the forum I found the details for the 2 Off-Road clubs and decided to ping an email to the closest one at Gateshead - Dynamix.
Dynamix is run by a guy called Paul who was really helpful. He replied really quickly to my email and said that the best thing was to pop down and take a look one Sunday when they are running. So, 2 weeks later I jumped on the Metro (because I didn't have a car yet) to see what it was all about. Typical for me though, it was a Regional Event meeting that week, so no-one was there!

OK, not strictly true, as there was a guy running around testing his new car (which is how I knew it a Regionals weekend) but he was helpful enough to answer some questions and tell me to come back next week if I wanted to talk to Paul. The following week I headed down and Paul was kind enough to explain the basics, the types of cars, the progress in Off-Road over the last few years and how often his club run etc. The other racers there were really helpful too, letting me look over their cars, the equipment they use and what they prefer to run. Also, I got to see the cars in action, running round the track, over jumps (not always successfully) and watching them race. There were a few different types of car (I will get into those later) so I got to see a good mix of cars and came away with loads more information than I came with the most important thing - Confirmation that I wanted to run Off-Road Buggies!!! as there was a good local track nearby and the cars looked cool. This is something I have begun to find is common with newbies looking at the sport, the buggies just look cool as they jump over stuff, at high speed, on tracks that look much more challenging than a flat strip of tarmac.
The next choice was whether I was to run 2wd or 4wd and then, what buggy as I was to learn there are a few on the market.............