Used to race my Mardave Apache at Chingford Car Club in Essex. We used to race on the outskirts of Epping forest, but in a small clearing under the trees.
I remember Pete Stevens and George Land quite regularly turning up with their Zerdas with the belt slip clicking. Lap counting was a manual affair, calling out the numbers and finals went down to k on a regular basis.
In winter we raced indoors in 'the Lid' at the nearby scout park where we later had a permanent track.
I remember there being lots of home made and extremely modified cars.
The Hotshot wasn't so popular at our club.
Then the RC10 came along - and I stared in amazement when I saw people drilling holes, cutting down the chassis and sometimes making a complete mess of these brilliant machines. We were still running Apaches and a Frog.
We stopped racing for a while and came back with an ultima based bitsa which my brother got into the A or B finals (2 & 4wd raced together) and a Raider until he got a Procat and I later got a Topcat- which became a Cougar then a Cougar2.
You used to see the look of panic on people's faces for the last 30seconds of a race as their cars started dumping .....
When I first started I remember reading an article in Model Car Monthly by George Land about speed controllers. The general jist was that variable resistor speed controllers fitted to small fast servos were the way to go, and it would be very unlikely for electronic speed controllers to become small enough or efficient enough to challeng them.
How times change!
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