Anyone into Nitro RC cars?

Possibly a bit niche which is one of the reasons for me asking.

Bought one for my 9 yr old as a surprise Christmas extra. Wasn’t a main present so (as is my natural leaning) went used and cheap. Ended up with an ACME Condor pro. Had to replace the engine which was a bit of a faff as the replacement was marginally longer. Then I managed to crash it and break the steering arm on Christmas Day. That wasn’t my finest parenting hour I have to say.

Really just wondering where/if people use them. It’s a bit loud for the street. I feel a bit of a knob screaming it round the parking area at the local fields. He’s fairly scared of it currently as its bloody fast (although does now appear to be stuck in second gear) so I end up doing most the actual driving which makes me look like ones of those dads who won’t let the lad have a go.

And keeping it tuned is a bloody nightmare.

We use the local park & ride car park in the evenings. Nice tarmac few cars & illuminated.

These day I would go electric over nitro they are faster now for a decent one and quiet, nitro is always a faff tuning them etc.

Last one I had was a big 1/5 2 stroke petrol and that was far to loud to use most places

As wiggles says go electric, always had problems getting mine to run.

Electric is the way now. I can get my 7 year old son to walk for miles over the fells if he drives daddy’s axial trail truck while he’s doing it. Lipo batteries really are remarkable.

Raced them for a few years, very addictive and makes mtb’s look cheap 🙂

Keep away from people, use a fail safe while learning, practice in nice open spaces for the lad until he gets the hang of it, like a park when it quiet.
Keep run times short to avoid annoying other people.

If you have a new engine it needs to run in, set fairly rich for 40-50 mins slowly leaning out after that until it run smoothly.
Dont over lean the mixture, it makes it fast but unreliable, plus reduces the life of the engine.
Don’t use old fuel, makes them run poorly, also some brands of fuel are better than other.

Once you can keep it running well and fairly confident of the controls find a local club with a track, getting around a track gives controlling the car a whole new dimension.

With new battery technology I would probabbly go down the electric route if starting again.

Probably the greatest son/father hobby on the planet, enjoy 🙂

Jes – thanks for that, good advice.

I’m all run in now. I think he’s scared of crashing it having witnessed how mortified I was after having done the same (even though most my angst was due to me crashing his pressie). Failsafe is fitted but not tested.

I went nitro after poor battery experiences as a teen. I do appreciate that tech will have moved on massively since then but the fact that it has a proper engine really does still appeal. Plus, the kids at the park seem to think it’s cool……….

Just adding my opinion. Modern brushless motors and lipo batteries make electric cars pretty damn fast, though still not as quick as nitro.

Only down side is you need a pile of them as they only last 5 ish minutes (buy a car battery and charger and you can drive all day)

We’ve got electric, charge a bunch of batteries and off you go.
From what I’ve been told nitro and petrol RC need careful maintenance to keep them running sweet.

We have a HPI e-firestorm flux and a maverick(HPI) ion DT.
Both brilliant cars, the firestorm can do over 70mph and the maverick 19mph, piloted by my 5 year old son.
I generally drive the firestorm as it’s too fast for my son, currently geared for around 45mph.
It gets a good laugh with the dog walker’s, the dogs chase the car and knacker themselves out..But never catch it 😀

I get about 30mins out of a 3s 5000mah Lipo on the firestorm

Unfortunately crashes and breakages are part of the learning curve.

Still remember a buddy losing signal/connection when we were first learning , car went flat out for 100m before hitting a fence post.
Thankfully didn’t hit any real cars or a person, may have been nasty, surprising just needed a new front wishbone.

Also try a lipo reciever battery, it will reduce most of the connections issues we used to get with nicads dropping off power towards the end of a run a run.

Wow, 30 mins sounds amazing. Tank of fuel doesn’t last that. Battery tech really has moved on. I may look at electric if I continue to be frustrated by this thing.

I used to race a 1/8 scale truggy about 10 years ago, it was the most unsatisfying hobby I’ve had. Used to race it on a Sunday and something would inevitably break at some point ending the day, then I used to clean it, order and fit an expensive replacement part then do the same again the next week! To be fair it was good fun and I miss the noise and the smell but it was expensive to keep it running.

Nitro? Glow old boy. Don’t get all US-ified on us now, what what.

some brands blends or mixes of fuel are better than other. work better for your particular motor

…in general.

No car experience but plenty time spent on glow powered planes.

Really just wondering where/if people use them

Find a club – go racing.

I’ve a Traxxas revo 3.3 NITRO 😉

Haven’t used it for a few years bar getting it up and running to show off to the lad.
It’s large and noisy. And a bit ofa faff.
But when it’s going it’s brilliant fun.

It’s a monster truck style, so amazing off road. I used to take it to the local BMX track when I lived in Bournemouth, and would make that thing fly….

Now teh lad is a bit older I’m going to take it to the beach or large fields, and play there.

Wow, 30 mins sounds amazing. Tank of fuel doesn’t last that

No, but the whole benefit of nitro is you just fill it up again (whilst it’s running) and you’re good to go!!

DrP

Nitro? Glow old boy.

Oh glow plugs. Now I understand. Control line aircraft in my yoof.

Not really adding anything but I’ll add my 2 pence..

Currently got a HPI savage, it’s great fun but a real hassle to keep tuned and always spend 90% of the time trying to get it working properly, when it does eventually work it’s bloody noisy and drinks fuel at an alarming rate!

I’ve been looking at converting it to electric, which I reckon will be doable for about £65 if I make the adaption kit myself. Currently in the planning stage but how hard can it be?!

Main benefit will be ability to just take it down the part for a quick spin rather than having to find somewhere I’m not going annoy people!

I used to race a bit, Infact the last of my kit has just sold on eBay. I had a Losi 8ight 2.0 with a Nova P5 engine. My tool box contained enough spare to built a complete spare car and then some. I also had a spare engine and five sets of wheels and tyres for different track conditions as well as umpteen different springs and shock and diff oils.
I got out of it after someone threatened to rip my head off because I got in their way. It bloody toy car racing at the end of the day!
Costs – well my kit must have been running at closet to £2k
But I would certainly say that it’s worth getting decent kit as cheap stuff just breaks and ruins your enjoyment. Good engines that are properly run in are easy to start as well (with a starter box).

ust adding my opinion. Modern brushless motors and lipo batteries make electric cars pretty damn fast, though still not as quick as nitro.

Only down side is you need a pile of them as they only last 5 ish minutes (buy a car battery and charger and you can drive all day)

that was true about 10 years ago…

You can buy an off the shelf electric car that will do 100mph now and batteries last 20-40minutes so as much as a tank of fuel if you have decent ones.

Id get about six minutes from a tank full on my car at race pace.pit stops are part of the race and the battery guys have to come in for a dummy stop to make it fair,
Good LiPo’s are expensive (very) and I’ve see more than one car catch fire during a race. I’ve seen a few packs catch fire during charging as well.

I’d have to disagree with decent lipos being expensive. I’ve ordered all mine from hobbyking (Europe warehouse) turnigy nano tech. Never paid more than. £30 a battery.

The fast guys were paying around about £130 per pack – I’m not up on LiPo numbers to tell you which ones they were. Cheaper ones are certainly available though.

I used to race both eletric 1/10th road and off road buggies and 1/8th nitro then brushless buggies many moons ago. Nitro was always more fun for racing, whereas electric was way more fun for just messing about in the park/street/woods/bmx track without worrying about annoying anyone. Never had anyone complain about noise even tuning engines in the garden, people just thought i had the lawnmower on. cant do it at 11 o’clock at night before a race day though…

I would say give racing a go if there’s a club near you. you will obviously need a kit which matches what they race. I raced from 10 years old to 17ish with my grandad supporting me then dabbled in and out of it over the years. I really got the bug and it helped that I was always mid-pack in the higher up finals so you always had some good dog fights.

Agree for lipos use turnigy from hobbyking they worked fine for me as i didnt want to shell out on expensive ones when i wasn’t racing that regularly.

Top race spec 2S Lipos are £90 or less and I place well in national competitions with cheaper hobbyking ones. Never seen one catch fire in a car and the only time one went up when charging was due to the owner abusing it with regards to charge rate. Luckily it was in a lipo sack so contained long enough to get it to a safe place. If you charge them properly and leave them at the correct storage voltage etc then there is no issue.

Even if I wasn’t racing electric I would still go that route over nitro for the reasons mentioned above ie lack of noise, reliability etc

If you’re letting a 9 year old drive a fast nitro car in public places you might want to consider joining the BRCA which gives you third party insurance if you drive it into someone

dlr’s right on joining BRCA. always use a failsafe too as a minimum.

I’ve seen a lipo go up at Wombwell when they had only just come out. It was in a 1/10th touring car going full pelt down the straight then it just became a flaming fireball and shot straight on at the end of the straight into a tyre wall! The guy was gutted and fortunate it didn’t explode badly or hit someone.

Yer good point on the failsafe, most receivers have them, check the manual, should stop make it stop if out of range etc

I have a 1/8th Hyper 8.5 Pro Buggy, running a .28 Go Engine with Savox servo’s and a 3PK tranny. This thing is fast and near uncontrollable, until I tweaked the accelerator and steering settings. I actually have 2 settings, one for me where I have 100% throttle and fast steering and another that is 60% throttle with slow steering, for those friends that say “can I have a go”. I did that once and my NTC3+ touring RC hit a kerb sideways at about 35mph, which has bent the chassis. Lesson learned!

The Hyper is sat on a shelf gathering dust. I keep meaning to use it, but then remember tuning it is an arse and by the time I’ve tuned it I’ve run out of fuel! Luckily you could just add more fuel and carry on. I would need a shit load of batteries to get the run time of my Nitro 😆

When I did use it, I was able to use it in a friends field, I built a few jumps for it. Luckily there an track running parallel with the train tracks, that has a 2 lines and a few jumps. There is an abandoned BMX track (Keynsham) nearby that RC’ers would also use.

I also used to have a RC drifter, I had about 8 batteries and a 12V charger. When it was an evening of drifting, I would hook up the charger to the car so I could get more run time.

You really just need to research your local area and maybe checkout some RC forums for where people use their RC’s. MSUK [/url]was always popular.

RE the nitro to brushless conversion – I’m really tempted by this for my Revo..they do actually make a brushless revo, but the price..wow!!

Mine’s kitted out with Spektrum stuff, so that contains the failsafe etc in it.

Will look at the e conversion prices as it would make the care MUCH easier to use, tbh..

DrP

Ive got a stack of Turnigy lipos as my aircraft use the same size as my Axial SCX trail truck/crawler. Theyre really good and cheap, no problems.

We have a race track near us as part of halifax rc model club.
I took my son to watch one weekend, thinking, ‘this might be fun to get into”. I couldn’t believe the amount of kit these guys had. They filled two tier work benches with electronic kizmos and gadgets and spare parts. It looked to me like a very high barrier to entry or being in any way competitive.
I was truly staggered, even against the concept of biking being expensive at the upper end.
So we didn’t join.

Not familiar with the classes in nitro buggy racing but in electric it tends to be just 2 or 4wd. Yes it can be silly expensive but you can still have fun cheaply by buying 2nd hand kit. My electric buggy setup was sub £150 without radio gear as the base was a couple of years old, I still place midfield or better at the local club. With outdoor and indoor electric circuit racing there are a variety of classes, the Tamiya “mini” (M03/M05/M06) are relatively cheap, some run the class with no hops allowed at all. I got a complete car with all electrics and basic radio gear for £70 off ebay to use outside when it’s too filthy for my (expensive…) touring car. Good class for a bit of fun, parents bring their kids along etc. I added working headlights to my car which definately made it quicker 😉

dlr – Member

With outdoor and indoor electric circuit racing there are a variety of classes, the Tamiya “mini” (M03/M05/M06) are relatively cheap, some run the class with no hops allowed at all.

There’s a Tamiya buggy class based on this type of idea. You can run a particular chassis – Tamiya DT03 for example, with upgrades limited to bearings and perhaps a mild motor tune (I’m not completely familiar with the actual rules).
I bought a Neo Fighter just over a year ago and thought there might be somewhere near me, but the only place seems to do indoor racing using ‘cars’ rather than buggies.

I used to race at NDOR – we have three or four categories within each class so you start off the meeting in D group and if you did well enough in your 20 minute heat you’d bump up to C and so on. Even those on the tightest budgets could race. The problem is that you if you break something and you don’t have spares then thats your day over.

Rockhopper I used to race at the Halifax circuit years ago. In fact I raced all over the UK, 1/8th scale IC on-road. You are right, the amount of kit you need for a weekends racing is staggering. You would get through at least 5 or 6 sets of tyres over a weekend – and you’d need a load of different compounds depending on track conditions. Nearly a bottle of fuel. You’d need a couple of spare engines and spare exhausts. Spare bodyshells. Multiple spares of car components – wishbones, drive shafts, shock absorbers, different strength springs, different oils for the dampers, clutch bits, gearbox spares with different size gears etc. Spare radio gear – servos, receiver. Starter box. Fuel bottle. Tool box. It was great fun but expensive and very time consuming

Apologies for hijacking OP but hopefully my question fits the thread – I’d love to get back into RC but am completely uninterested in RTR type vehicles – I have a half decent Spektrum tranny somewhere and would love to build up a proper ‘kit’ from parts – I’d also want loads of available spares and loads more upgrades. Shiny CNC and carbon parts for the win.

Fully on and off road capable, good handling, 4wd be nice, not fussed about scale – where do you guys recommend I start looking?