Niteshooter

These cars are from the 80's. Up here in Toronto we had several dirt tracks where we could race our R/C cars and trucks. Also every year at the Toronto Hobby show which also had an indoor track. Lots of fun though to be competitive lots of $$$ got spent as well. The dominant players up here were Kyosho, Tamaya, Schumacher with Traxxs I think in the mix as well.

Many of us ran Kyrosho cars with the Turbo Optima being a popular car at first but then was upgraded to the Mid Optima. In the photo below were the last round of cars I raced. Far left is a Mid Optima with an upgraded carbon fibre bottom plate. The original stock plate was aluminum but there was a lighter carbon fibre plate from a third party that many of us ran. Until Kyosho released the Mid Optima Pro which is the middle car. It had a two piece lexan body, first time there was a bottom tray on these cars along with a carbon fibre bottom plate. Also of note were the Kyosho custom 6 cell battery packs which fit into the wells on the chassis.

Finally the car on the right is the front wheel drive Maxxum FF.



The Maxxum was a game changer, up to this point 2WD class consisted of cars that were rear wheel drive. These cars took considerably more skill to drive competitively than their 4WD counterparts.



What makes the Maxxuum unbeatable is the light weight and front wheel drive. It literally slaughtered it's rear wheel drive competition er well it did until it was banned....

Since the car was underweight for the 2WD class I taped a heavy truck wheel weight to the front bumper, this brought the car up to legal weight and greatly increased traction as it put more weight on the front wheels. It also made the car dangerous for corner marshals should I hit them at speed. Novak speed controllers and Team Checkpoint motors were my preferred parts.



The Mid Optima was my personal favourite, very fast with the right motor(s) and ESC's.



This one was modified to run with saddle packs instead of the older style stick battery.



The car I raced most often was this Mid, I called it a "Pro" but it might actually be called an SE.



The main difference was the factory lexan belly pan and factory carbon fibre chassis. This car was fast, very fast. Upgrades included Team Checkpoint motor which is what I ran pretty much exclusively in all my 4wd and 2wd cars, Novak electronic speed controls which I ran on all the cars and the trucks and my Futaba pistol grip controllers.



Always had a good supply of parts, suspension pieces tended to get broken in very hard crashes and tubes of ball bearings for the axels and drive trains. Also shocks and shock oil though I never really experimented much with oil since I typically only raced on one or two of the local tracks. For the outdoor track that didn't have power I had a Honda 800w inverter generator, was noisy and smelled but had plenty of power for a full day of racing. One of the other things a lot of us used were these cheap dollar stock neck hammocks that we used as stands for working on our cars.

icrashbikes

Wow those are awesome. The oldest I have are a pair of Losi XXT trucks that were probably from the late 90s. They are still in the garage but I can't justify the money they would need in receivers, motors, speed controllers and parts. Not when there are E Revos and X01s floating about the house. And helis, I dig the helis.

Niteshooter

Thanks, I agree parts for these 'vintage' R/C cars and trucks isn't worth it unless you already have them. Granted I suspect my battery packs are pretty much done, certainly would not be good for real racing. After the cars and trucks I branched out into gas and fast electric boats mainly because the radios could be used on them as well as some of my motors and battery packs. Downside of the boats was if they crapped out away from shore you either had to get someone to retrieve them or get really handy with a fishing pole and hook! I got really handy with the latter and only ran in small ponds.

And before life got in the way completely I started flying R/C helicopters but man those can be pretty tough to fly. I have a couple of E-Sky helicopters one single rotor and the other a twin but every time you crash one you wind up having to replace the blades.