The "oh, now I get it" moment

[Saito2 6686]

Being a Tamiya diehard from the beginning meant that I stuck with and knew RC through Tamiya. This meant I understood performance and evolution only from the Tamiya perspective. Here's a Hot Shot and here's how it runs. Here's a Thundershot and here's how it runs better than the Hot Shot. Here's a Vanquish and so on...Of course in the pages of my only connection to the outside RC world, RC Car Action, I got to read about other brand's buggies but not really understanding how Tamiya stacked up. All I knew was that in RC Car Action, Tamiya got ONE sentence in the article about '89 Worlds and TWO sentences in the article about the '91 Worlds (which contradicted each other anyway, one claiming they brought an Egress, the other claiming a modified Manta Ray). Oh, and some fellow that they didn't follow much named Jamie Booth was driving them. 

I let some RC10s into my collection first years back and with the re-releases, a Scorpion and Optima too. Had the Optima out for its first run today and for the third time I had the "oh, now I get it moment". With the Scorpion, it was "gee, this thing is far beyond what a stock-ish SRB can do, no wonder they hung with the RC10s for a little bit. Then the RC10. I was already impressed with it's material qualities/durability but running it was an epiphany. Wow, I thought, no wonder it wasn't until the Madcap/Astute came out until Tamiya was at least in the ballpark. Not to put down the Fox, but the RC10 incredibly ahead of its time. The Optima today was the final piece. I was so used to how its contemporaries, the Hot Shot series performed. Rugged 4wd traction with a load of understeer. I was so used to flipping the brake on mid turn to bring the Hot Shot around that the Optima first run shocked me. When you cranked the wheel, it turned, like right now. It almost reminded me of an Avante how quickly it could pull into a tight turn, but without any twichiness. 

So whats all this catching up mean? Not much in the end. I have a great new respect for the performance that the other brands offered. I still prefer driving Tamiyas for their idiosyncrasies that lend them a "soul". I guess its better to be more well rounded even if favorites still remain your favorites. 

[markbt73 5315]

That completely neutral, goes-where-you-point-it attitude of the Optima is part of what makes it one of my favorite chassis of all time. And the Mid, if you ever get a chance to drive one of those, is even better, though they do get a little twitchy. It's funny; I was the other way around with those two. I knew how an Optima drove, but never touched a Hotshot until I built my re-release, and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't turn, like, at all.

The Kyosho re-releases have come a long way in their metallurgy, however; the chassis rails of the old Optimas and Scorpions were pretty easy to bend. It's one of the reasons I haven't driven my restored Optima yet: one good whack on the nose and the front skidplate and chassis rails are tweaked. I don't have a re-release Optima, but the re-Scorpion is much stiffer than its ancestor.

And we need to remember that while Tamiya may have been considered an also-ran in competition circles, their engineering and quality were light-years ahead of some of their '80s contemporaries. I had a Marui Big Bear back in the day, and it was wretched compared to my buddy's Lunchbox. And his brother's Kyosho Big Brute was no prize either. A few years ago I got my hands on a new-built, never-run Nichimo Exceed 443, and really really wanted to run it... but the front steering bellcrank was already broken. And the whole car felt wobbly and brittle at the same time, like flexing the suspension would break it. A Hotshot or Boomerang is built like a tank by comparison.

[Juggular 4964]

I can't say I know how good other brands are.  

Until I asked, "Must have Kyosho?" I had completely forgotten about Kyosho Double Dare I had built. I sold it within a year. No regrets and I promptly forgot about it.  Double Dare was completely unimpressive. It was like a blown up version of some cheap Radio Shack toy.  And I went back to Tamiya.  

But I was blown away by how many Kyosho cars are out there.  It's like discovering an entire parallel universe.  If I could, I would like to add Javelin and Turbo Scorpion before my collection hits #30.  The look of RC10 isn't impressive, but from what I hear, it sounds like something I should check out eventually...

 

 

[Pablo68 1049]

About the same time I was running several Hornets and had just sold a Monster Beetle I had had enough of, I bought an Ultima, more or less the 1st version.

That was my 'I get it now' moment. It handled, properly. Though that made it a bit boring for neighborhood bashing.

I was gutted when it was stolen.

[taffer 948]

The other way to look at this......

Always had tamiya's, from my first Hornet in 1986 and friends and relatives also having tamiya's.

A few times over the last 15 years after getting back into the hobby... when its even more tamiya, tamiya, tamiya because of increased funds there are points in time when I thought, "time to try something a little different"

In other words, buy a Kyosho, Axial, HPI, Losi etc... and quickly find out that even after all this time their manuals are not as nice, the build or maintenance isn't as enjoyable, you have no spare parts like you have for tamiya's etc.....

Oh, now I get it! I've associated myself with tamiya for so long nothing else cuts it! even if performance isn't quite there....So I return back to tamiya, refreshed that its the manufacturer I'll continue to be with! :-)

[Saito2 6686]

29 minutes ago, taffer said:

I've associated myself with tamiya for so long nothing else cuts it!

I know what you mean. I can fly through their manuals with ease, identify most hardware with a mere glance, understand their construction methods like no other manufacturer all with a screwdriver in one hand and a box wrench in the other. Better or not, I'm not used to hex drivers at this point.

[73robb 132]

When I raced BITD, the only was to be able to compete with the pack was to have an Optima Mid or CAT XlS - or constantly upgrade a hotshot/boomerang, but this ended up costing more than buying something else that needed very little to get it competitive.  I remember a 'rich kid' turned up at my club once with an Avante powered with a technigold - it was quick but just couldn't match the Optimas or Schumachers though the corners.

My favourite to drive was always the Optima Mid, but did have a Cat at one point though I could never get it setup quite how I wanted it.

Even though they were not overly competitive at the time, I think Tamiya always hold the nostalgic value, as without them a large number of us wouldn't have got into the hobby to start with. In my collection now I have Tamiyas ,Schumachers, Optima Mids, Yokomo Dogfighter & a PB Mustang, but pretty much the only one that gets driven frequently is my Blitzer Beetle or Blackfoot 

[Mad Ax 9311]

I guess I never really had this moment.  BITD, and I'm talking around 1996, when my RC collection was limited to a very-abused 3rd-hand Grasshopper with bald tyres and a ripped up Fox body and a Mud Blaster that I'd owned from new and had driven into the ground, I decided to treat myself to another car.  At that point I had my own job and was just about able to scrape up enough funds for an NIB ARTR Kyosho Sand Master II - my first (and last) nitro RC.

At the time I anticipated, since it was nitro-powered, that it would be way superior to the rough old plasticky Tamiya models I'd owned so far.  The truth was it was very much the bargain-basement parts-bin budget car.  The chassis was from an electric car (it even had the cut-out for the stick pack), the tailpipe spat fuel all over the rear suspension, the shell prevented access to the air filter (the recommended way to stop the motor), and while it did come with plastic oil shocks pre-installed, it still had the same wobbly plastic bushings on the wheels that my Tamiyas had.  Even the included Futaba radio set looked and felt cheap compared to the Acoms handsets I had from a few years previous.

It wasn't much better on the road.  I never got the motor to run sweetly; it vibrated its way through several cheap pot-metal motor mounts, lunch a pinion and spur and was generally a pain in the backside and a huge waste of my hard-earned cash.  So my one-and-only experience with Kyosho left me with something of a sour taste.  I guess that's unfair, because I now know Kyosho made some very competitive (not to mention great-looking) electric models in the 80s that should have been just as high-up on my wishlist when I got back into RC in the mid-naughties as anything from Tamiya.

I had a foray with a Corally RDX touring car, which was like something from the future compared to a TT01, but it never really blew me away on track.  Despite being full-carbon-and-alloy-everything, it still needed a significant amount of setup that I wasn't able to give it, and (perhaps more tellingly) needed someone behind the controller who knew what they were doing.  I managed a few good nights and challenged FTD when the quick boys were on holiday but it wasn't a lightbulb moment when I drove it.

Interestingly I returned to touring car racing a few years later with a TA05-IFS that I never, ever managed to get to behave on track, and it wasn't any better when I converted it to conventional suspension..  Even in the hands of other club racers (who almost exclusively preferred Schumacher or Losi) it never performed right.  Everybody who gave it a test-drive told me it felt that it had a distinct lack of mechanical grip, but nobody could work out exactly what was wrong with it.  The TA05 wasn't supposed to be a bad car at club-level racing so there must have been something specifically wrong with how my example had been assembled but we never tracked it down.  I sold it off dirt cheap to a someone who said he was going to turn it into a drift car, and two weeks later saw someone else struggling to get it around the club track...

Anyway, I digress.  A little while after that I got into buggy racing.  I tried an Ansmann Mad Monkey that self-destructed its gearbox on the first event, while a mate was trying to persuade a contemporary 4wd Kyosho to behave without lunching its transmission.  I switched to a B4.1 Worlds Factory Team car, my first foray into Associated territory, and although it was much more durable than the Ansmann that was clearly based on it, it again never gave me the feeling that it was fully planted or able to hit the track with any more confidence than anything else I'd driven.  Part of the problem was that I'd expected "worlds factory team" to mean "fully hopped up" but in fact what it meant was it came with the specific base setup used on the Worlds car, which might have been worthwhile had I been racing on the same tracks, but in fact as I was on a tight grass track that often got wet with dewfall before the night was over, I needed a completely different setup.  I never really got to grips with that either.

The real lightbulb moment did finally come some years later.  Probably about 2 years ago now.  A friend had organised a "friendly" in a grass pit beside his house.  I was fresh from the Iconic Revival so I ran my Bear Hawk and HotShot in a series of time trials.  The Bear Hawk performed pretty well considering, and I finished the day with a very respectable time.  Then a mate offered a transmitter-swap for his Yokomo Hotdog.

Wow.  That was a planted car.  For the first time in my life, I felt that I was able to look at a corner and go around it.  That car went everywhere I pointed it, faultlessly.  It was amazing.  On a different planet.

And I think the point there is that it's not just about having the better car, but having the right setup.  I've never amassed the knowledge or experience or selection of spares necessary to set up a car for a track.  The Hotdog was set up just right for the little grass bowl.

That's one of the downsides of racing alone, pitting alone and generally being a maverick when it comes to choosing a chassis: nobody can ever advise me with setup.  I'm always flying blind and working it out as I go along...

[Wooders28 4722]

11 hours ago, Pablo68 said:

About the same time I was running several Hornets and had just sold a Monster Beetle I had had enough of, I bought an Ultima, more or less the 1st version.

Similar - I was running a frog, got sick of buying diff parts, everyone was running the RC10,so, i saved my money, and bought the Ultima! Loved that car...

 

 

[DrewZ 188]

40 minutes ago, Wooders28 said:

Similar - I was running a frog, got sick of buying diff parts, everyone was running the RC10,so, i saved my money, and bought the Ultima! Loved that car...

Painful seeing that Falcon there, totally outclassed in terms of performance. For me, it was a friend's JRX2 that put mine in its place BITD. But these days the old silver can Tamiyas are still my favorite. Just right for a back yard track. Even more fun if you get a couple of them running together.

[Juggular 4964]

54 minutes ago, PoormanRC said:

It was all the enjoyment that a Tamiya can give! Quirky, sloppy Suspension, the lot.

Yep!  Very well said.

Almost 2 decades ago, I met my English teacher from 10th grade.  I was a nice model student.  He did not remember me.  But he did remember one my my buddies who ran away from home for a week.  Tamiya is like a nice looking child with a bit of a problem that you remember fondly despite the headaches.  

And Tamiya instructions ask us to set up the shocks too stiff.  It can be set soft and supple.  Bigwig chassis can float while the tires do all the dancing up and down.  

 

 

[SuperChamp82 743]

Have other vintage marques been technically better over the years ?

Absolutely - Optima Mids, RC10s, Yokomo Dogs + Schumacher Cats to name but a few. 

Were they also better to drive ? 

Its hard to argue against any in top end racing ... but it largely depends on what you count as fun beyond that.

Do any have the pioneering spirit, rich history or gloriously simple (yet detailed) build experience of Tamiya ? 

For me, no - and sometimes Tamiya get everything else right too ... which is as much a light bulb moment as anything else 

[markbt73 5315]

15 hours ago, Juggular said:

I can't say I know how good other brands are.  

Until I asked, "Must have Kyosho?" I had completely forgotten about Kyosho Double Dare I had built. I sold it within a year. No regrets and I promptly forgot about it.  Double Dare was completely unimpressive. It was like a blown up version of some cheap Radio Shack toy.  And I went back to Tamiya.  

But I was blown away by how many Kyosho cars are out there.  It's like discovering an entire parallel universe.  If I could, I would like to add Javelin and Turbo Scorpion before my collection hits #30.  The look of RC10 isn't impressive, but from what I hear, it sounds like something I should check out eventually...

 

 

It's almost like there were two Kyoshos in the 80s: there was the "metal" Kyosho, which included the Scorpion and Progress/Gallop and the 1/8 gas buggies and later te Optimas and Ultimas,  and then there was the "plastic" Kyosho, with the Pegasus and its siblings, and the Big Brute/Double Dare. And it's hard to believe that they even came from the same company, sometimes. A few cars sort of bridged the gap: the Rocky comes to mind, but most were one "family" or the other.

And if you started out with plastic Kyosho, you can easily be forgiven for not realizing how good metal Kyosho was....

[Juggular 4964]

 

55 minutes ago, PoormanRC said:

Thank You! 

Yup, the Problem Child with a heart of gold.   Tamiya Springs in general are way too stiff!! Makes too many people believe that completely extended, is the right way to set your Suspension up. They couldn't be more WRONG! Not their fault.... 

I have found in recent years that Axial Springs, which come in various lengths, diameters and more importantly, Spring Rates, are the Best for tuning most Tamiya Rigs!  A friend has a Spring measuring Device (left over from our Semi-Pro days). My Stock CC-01 Springs measured 4.14lbs per inch!!!  

I found similar sized SCX10 one lower Springs, they were 1.33lbs per inch! Now when I just place my Landfreeder down, it will droop roughly 3/16". The Suspension now actually goes UP over bumps, and DOWN into ruts!! 👍👍  The Handling improvement is staggering. And IMHO, the CC-01 has got to be the HARDEST Chassis to make smooth!!

~ Carmine 💥 ⛽

2

Matteo (from youtube) uses softer settings.  Years ago, his little RC movies used to show a car going up and down following the terrain.  It just looked "toy-like."  Over the years, his shocks got softer, showing real-car like movement.  The chassis stays relatively still, while the shocks handle the ground.  That looks much better on film.  Nobody is sitting in the car. So it doesn't matter either way, I suppose.  But if the suspension is there, why not use it to the fullest?  

Tamiya's first off-road car, XR311, uses very soft torsion bar system.  I think Tamiya engineers gave a lot of thought into how the tires should move.  From then on, Tamiya started to go hard.  It's like Tamiya considers tires to be "muddy boots," and tries to keep mud as far away from the body as possible.  Leaf springs hardly work.  Many Bruiser folks take off a leaf or two to make them softer.  My Juggernaut's leaf springs hardly worked either.  I put T-Maxx springs, and they actually do the work they are supposed to do now.    

But CC01 springs measuring 4lbs per inch is astounding!  CC01 must weigh like 2.5 pounds, and each spring measures over 4 pounds?  Tamiya is so weird...  why don't they want their suspension to work properly?  Thank you for the bit about the Axial springs.  There is only so much you can do with oil and piston.  I should look into ordering some Axial springs.  

 

[Juggular 4964]

9 minutes ago, markbt73 said:

It's almost like there were two Kyoshos in the 80s: there was the "metal" Kyosho, which included the Scorpion and Progress/Gallop and the 1/8 gas buggies and later te Optimas and Ultimas,  and then there was the "plastic" Kyosho, with the Pegasus and its siblings, and the Big Brute/Double Dare. And it's hard to believe that they even came from the same company, sometimes. A few cars sort of bridged the gap: the Rocky comes to mind, but most were one "family" or the other.

And if you started out with plastic Kyosho, you can easily be forgiven for not realizing how good metal Kyosho was....

I had not heard that distinction before.  I should keep that in mind.  

Then again, re-res are better, right? (even plastic ones like Turbo Scorpion?)  

 

[markbt73 5315]

All the Scorpions are about 90% metal. Only the tub (which isn't structural) and the body/rollcage are plastic. It's very much like an SRB in the way it goes together, except with two aluminum rails for thr main chassis instead of a fiberglass plate.

[Saito2 6686]

24 minutes ago, markbt73 said:

It's almost like there were two Kyoshos in the 80s: there was the "metal" Kyosho, which included the Scorpion and Progress/Gallop and the 1/8 gas buggies and later te Optimas and Ultimas,  and then there was the "plastic" Kyosho, with the Pegasus and its siblings, and the Big Brute/Double Dare. And it's hard to believe that they even came from the same company, sometimes.

How very true. There wasn't much Kyosho buggy action outside of the Optima series in my corner of the Northeast. If you raced 2wd, it was RC10 or nothing. There were plenty of Kyosho trucks and they were, let's say, not the best. Tamiya, at least, had a consistent quality across their line, one which was far better than some of the other plastic backyard basher brands. When I first saw a Kyosho buggy up close I was shocked at how nice it was since I was so used to the trucks' poor quality. People complain about ORV hex half shafts, but the Kyosho trucks had 100% flimsy, twist-able plastic half shafts. They also had 100% plastic outdrives on the gearbox running on plastic or steel BUSHINGS. One hobby shop owner in my area refused to carry the trucks due to their poor quality.

 

[Pablo68 1049]

8 hours ago, markbt73 said:

It's almost like there were two Kyoshos in the 80s: there was the "metal" Kyosho, which included the Scorpion and Progress/Gallop and the 1/8 gas buggies and later te Optimas and Ultimas,  and then there was the "plastic" Kyosho, with the Pegasus and its siblings, and the Big Brute/Double Dare. And it's hard to believe that they even came from the same company, sometimes. A few cars sort of bridged the gap: the Rocky comes to mind, but most were one "family" or the other.

And if you started out with plastic Kyosho, you can easily be forgiven for not realizing how good metal Kyosho was....

 

Yeah I hear ya. Loved the original Ultima. Ended up with an Outrage chassis among all my bits n pieces. Ultima arms and gearbox and a few bits n bobs, plasticky plasticky plasticky chassis, shocks and shock towers.
Couldn't believe it was the same company.

I have been pulled up on my opinion of the Outrage, that it was a budget car for beginners and there's nothing wrong with that. Fair point tbh.

[ThunderDragonCy 7876]

Loved reading this thread. I haven't owned any other brands, but seeing a few Optima restores on Instagram recently has got me wondering about those cars. I did have my own light bulb though, and it was with a Tamiya! Having learnt about handling and got into tuning the vintage and entry level chassis I have I was pretty happy with them. Then in May I picked up a bargain DN01 Zahhak from a fellow member. THAT was a revelation. It's not even the full TRF201 but my goodness it handles! Floats on its suspension, turns in hard despite being rear motor (something my Dt03 needs some help with!), so responsive. Absolutely love it. But that said, the buggies I drive most are Thunder Dragon and Ultra G. There's just something about wrestling the older cars around that is more interesting when I am just hooning them around a grass field. On track days my DN01 gets lapped for hours and it's amazing. Seems to me a lot of you guys had revelation moments with race grade kits from other brands? Maybe the revelation is just how good race grade kits are compared to hobby level?

[Saito2 6686]

1 hour ago, ThunderDragonCy said:

Seems to me a lot of you guys had revelation moments with race grade kits from other brands? Maybe the revelation is just how good race grade kits are compared to hobby level?

In my case, I had the Tamiya "competition" models of various eras and was fairly recently (last 4-5 years) comparing them to other manufacturers' cars from those same eras. When I ran a Scorpion, it was far beyond the Super Champ I was familiar with, the RC10, beyond the Fox and the Optima beyond the Hot Shot (and Super Shot in my case). It wasn't until I got some wheel-time with a Madcap, that I felt Tamiya was, or could be, on par with the RC10 of the same time period. I have no frame of reference for the Top Force, though it does run nice. Tamiya did slowly catch up. There were missteps (from a strictly competitive viewpoint) like the Avante and the Astute. However with the TRF201 or DN01, they finally made it. Looking at a coworker's B4 this week, one could see the similarities.

[Pablo68 1049]

22 minutes ago, Saito2 said:

In my case, I had the Tamiya "competition" models of various eras and was fairly recently (last 4-5 years) comparing them to other manufacturers' cars from those same eras. When I ran a Scorpion, it was far beyond the Super Champ I was familiar with, the RC10, beyond the Fox and the Optima beyond the Hot Shot (and Super Shot in my case). It wasn't until I got some wheel-time with a Madcap, that I felt Tamiya was, or could be, on par with the RC10 of the same time period. I have no frame of reference for the Top Force, though it does run nice. Tamiya did slowly catch up. There were missteps (from a strictly competitive viewpoint) like the Avante and the Astute. However with the TRF201 or DN01, they finally made it. Looking at a coworker's B4 this week, one could see the similarities.

The TRF201 basically was a B4. A metric one albeit. I have both a B4 (Stealth whatever that is) and the B4-ish TRF201. Really similar cars and in concept at least, the same thing.
The B4 still feels more planted and overall balanced than anything I've driven. I love both cars btw.

Even though I had the 'I get it' moment, the early Tamiya buggies are still my favourite cars to drive and muck about with.

[Yalson 514]

On 10/8/2018 at 11:11 PM, Juggular said:

I had not heard that distinction before.  I should keep that in mind.  

Then again, re-res are better, right? (even plastic ones like Turbo Scorpion?)  

 

Re-res are certainly different to the Kyosho originals. I have seen it said elsewhere on here that the Kyosho re-re cars are actually completely different to the originals, being made from different jigs and moulds. I could not believe this, as there was usually nothing wrong with the originals and any issues they did have were part of the "charm" of the car, which misty-eyed enthusiasts would be expecting.

However, I recently read elsewhere that all of the original tooling for most of their cars was destroyed some time ago, so all of their re-res genuinely are different cars, made to look as much as possible like the originals, but often incorporating better materials and design improvements. This is why parts from Kyosho re-res frequently aren't interchangeable with the originals.

It is also why Kyosho's re-re schedule is so slow compared to Tamiya's. Whereas Tamiya can hunt around in whichever warehouse they store these things, find the moulds and jigs, send them to China/Vietnam/wherever and flick the switch to make more, Kyosho have to take an original model and retro-design a workable model from the dimensions. I suspect this is also why Kyosho re-res are so comparatively expensive. They are having to redesign the wheel. Sometimes literally.

[Yalson 514]

On 10/8/2018 at 3:29 PM, Mad Ax said:

At the time I anticipated, since it was nitro-powered, that it would be way superior to the rough old plasticky Tamiya models I'd owned so far.  The truth was it was very much the bargain-basement parts-bin budget car.  The chassis was from an electric car (it even had the cut-out for the stick pack), the tailpipe spat fuel all over the rear suspension, the shell prevented access to the air filter (the recommended way to stop the motor), and while it did come with plastic oil shocks pre-installed, it still had the same wobbly plastic bushings on the wheels that my Tamiyas had.  Even the included Futaba radio set looked and felt cheap compared to the Acoms handsets I had from a few years previous.

It wasn't much better on the road.  I never got the motor to run sweetly; it vibrated its way through several cheap pot-metal motor mounts, lunch a pinion and spur and was generally a pain in the backside and a huge waste of my hard-earned cash.  So my one-and-only experience with Kyosho left me with something of a sour taste.  I guess that's unfair, because I now know Kyosho made some very competitive (not to mention great-looking) electric models in the 80s that should have been just as high-up on my wishlist when I got back into RC in the mid-naughties as anything from Tamiya.

I think the problems you were having there were because it was a nitro RC car, rather than because it was a Kyosho RC car. Cheap nitro cars are invariably awful and sound like an angry wasp trapped in a tuning fork factory. I have no doubt that Kyosho made a hash of the design, but even if they had made a good job of it, there is only so much you can polish a t*rd.

Although their instruction manuals were occasionally a little idiosyncratic and the models all had their own quirks, for the most part the build quality on Kyosho's "metal" (or carbon fibre) racing models was outstanding and they went together as well as any Tamiya.

[Yalson 514]

I had a couple of "Oh, I get it..." moments. I started out with a fairly standard Grasshopper I, which once I'd fettled it a little I considered to be a match for any other car, 2WD or 4WD. Then one day me and a friend were doing some backyard bashing, me with my 'Hopper and him with his Marui Ninja. I had never trusted 4WD up until that point, considering it complicated and inefficient. A short blast with the Ninja rather opened my eyes on that score. It had silky and fluid handling compared to the Grasshopper (obviously – everything has silky and fluid handling compared to the original Grasshopper) and you could actually drive it round corners rather than fighting it. His reaction to the Grasshopper's handling was an outburst of actual laughter at the fact it handled like a sack of rocks rolling down a hill. I believe his actual words were "I can't believe you actually RACE this!" I did. And with no little success, mainly because in those early beginner days at our local club, staying the course was everything and the 'Hopper was a) indestructible, b) incredibly reliable and c) could run for six minutes with a 27t Parma K-Stock motor on a fully charged 1200mah battery, meaning it never, ever dumped.

A bit later I got a LWB Mid. That was an "Oh, I get it..." moment all of its own.

Buying my first modified motor was also one. Swapping from that 27t K-Stock to a Schumacher Red Heat 17x2 was like finding out after flying it for a year that your plane had a hidden afterburner switch. It'd just last five minutes on 1200mah SCRs, and it wasn't all that quick as we had to gear it down to make sure it lasted the duration, but it felt quick to me and it was a massive step up.

 

[78Triumph 2610]

The "Oh, I get it moment" for me wasn't about car brands, it was when i switched from Nimh to LiPo.