I started racing R/C cars many years ago. The first major race I remember attending was in 1988, when I was 14 years old. This was at a major Tamyia and Orange Crush hobby show, in Vancouver, B.C. I raced my Brother's Tamyia Falcon, while he raced probably his Optima Mid.
My first R/C car was a hand-me down Radio Shack thing from my brother. It was a pickup truck with two speeds (shifted with a lever on the bed of the truck when stopped), and headlights. It sucked.
Then my Brother got a Tamyia Hornet a few years later for a Christmas gift. It was way cool! It was probably in September for my Birthday when I got my first R/C car -- an Ishpla Monster. Man oh man what a piece of crap! Even though it had independant suspension, it royally sucked. The gear diff was always skipping because of such shoddy quality. I pawned it off to someone who actually was stupid enough to buy it for about 1/10 what I payed for it. I replaced it with my Brother's Hornet; he had gotten a Tamyia Falcon from someone used (a friend of mine now; I didn't know him back then). The Hornet was a humungous leap forward in quality for me; the Falcon was a humungous leap forward in quality for my brother.
The Falcon had a problem of perpetually breaking dogbones. I never got this car off of my brother -- as I mentioned, I only borrowed it for this one race. I remember hopping up that Hornet with all sorts of goodies -- oil-filled dampers on all 4 corners, progressive rate springs on the back. . . I also had a Baja radio and a Beta 3 wire speed controller in a green case.
In the meantime, my brother ended up getting a Turbo Optima Mid. I ended up getting my first competitive R/C car -- a Team Associated RC 10. I raced this car for many years. The first hop-up I ever made to that car was to replace the original short front supension arms with Andy's long arms -- the second was to replace all 4 wheels and tires and use the stock ones for playing on the street. I ended up replacing every part on that car except for the hinge-pins because I had the car so long. Rear suspensions I had tried were some sort of fiberglass trailing suspension I got from someone, A&L rear trailing arms, some other plastic trailing arms, as well as the original rear suspension. It ended up with a Stealth trenamission, a graphite chassis, RPM rear suspension arms, and my own custom front suspension which used RC10T front suspension arms and kept the dimensions legal for racing. I even put tripple seals in all of my shocks. I won lots of races with that car, but I ended up replacing it with a Team Losi XX when they first came out. In the meantime, my brother had gotten a Schumacher Cat (somthing or other), and a Losi Jrx2. His custom front suspension had home-made front arms which both pivoted on a single hinge pin.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we had both gotten into the 1/12 scale carpet racing scene. My brother was the first to get a car, and his first was a RC12L when they were still a new car. Club rules had 6 minute qualifiers, and 8 minute mains. We raced 4 SC cells, Mabuchi/Igrashi "Tin Can" motors, and we used WD-40 as tracton wash. It worked great for 6 minutes, then it got real slick! That was fine for the qualifiers, but hellish for the mains! Club rules had us use SC's with the Tin Can motors, and this made us all highly competitive. When some of us would go to other events, we would always place very high against people with killer batteries and motors because we had gotten so good at driving.
I ended up getting a highly modified RC12i off of a fellow racer for my introduction into 1/12 scale racing. I ran that car for a couple years until getting myself a RC12L. I made a damper post stiffner for my 12L sometime before I saw the first commercial ones. I used this car for many years, and over time it kind of evolved with the rest of 1/12 scale racing with a shock, the reactive caster front suspension, and other such changes. I finally replaced it with the Trinity Revolver when it first came out. In October 1999, I got myself a Calendra Carpet Knife -- what a sweet handling car.
I rember racing with first 1200 SC's, then 1200 SCR's, 1700 SCE's, 1400 SCR's, Panasonic P170's, 1700 SCRC's and finally 1700 and 2000 RC's. I still have some 1200 SC Trinity matched 4-cell packs -- before anyone put labels on cells. The cool thing is just a few weeks ago, I dusted off these old 1200's and built myself a 12 cell pack (3 4-cells) for a laptop computer someone is lending me. They still work just grand.