RC cars have always been a big father/son activity for me and my son Clay. I got him started when he was 4 years old, and his skills have developed quite a bit over the years. Until now, we mainly raced around the cul-de-sac in front of our house and the big parking lot near the baseball stadium that is not too far away.
A friend of mine, Joe, is also into RC cars and mentioned that the Hobbytown hobby shop chains near us organize races on the weekends. After checking out the tracks at the Lake in the Hills location, we headed out to St. Charles to dive into some racing.
Although we left prepared to race our Tamiya Frogs (and get dusted), Joe was nice enough to lend us his Traxxas Rally car for Clay to race. We signed up Clay for the Juniors class, which had 11 participants on this extremely hot, muggy day. Clay was gridded in 7th place.
Once the race started, it was complete pandemonium, but also really fun.
The race course was set up in a parking lot, with some simple barriers to outline the course. As an option, racers could try a shorter part of the course that included jumps for a little extra challenge. Clay's car was not quite as good at hitting the jumps as the Stadium Trucks, but he fared well and did not damage Joe's extremely pricey ride.
During the race, the transponder which records laps fell off of Clay's car, so we could not tell what his finishing position was. But he raced well and brought his ride back in one piece, so we'll call that a success! Racing is every couple of weeks, and we'll be back soon with Clay's new ride, a Traxxas Slash.
Clay takes his position on the elevated area for racers to see the entire race course.
Here is a view of the race course. A standard parking lot, with wooden barriers to mark off the course, and a computerized lap timing system. Very nice.
Here the cars are lining up for the race. In total, there were 11 cars. It was quite a full grid!
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