The Backyard – Old Cars, New Glory

Greetings all and Happy Friday! Welcome to The Backyard!

Last weekend my Facebook feed was absolutely loaded with pictures from the Team Associated Vintage Off-Road Championships in Las Vegas. Friends, industry folks, racers I’ve known for years—it seemed like everybody was there.

And looking at all those pictures, I had a thought: somewhere along the way, vintage RC racing became one of the crown jewel parts of the modern RC hobby. (P.S. if you want to see some cool pics and video, check out this page on the JConcepts website)

That’s pretty wild when you think about it.

Vintage RC certainly isn’t a new thing. People have been collecting old cars and occasionally racing them for a long time. But now it’s different. These aren’t just a handful of collectors getting together to gingerly drive some old shelf queens around a track. People are traveling across the country to race these things, manufacturers and aftermarket companies are supporting them, and events like the one in Vegas have become legitimate destination events.

Vintage RC isn’t just about nostalgia anymore. It’s become a living, active part of the hobby. Its grown into it’s own thriving genre.

I suppose some of this was inevitable. I’ve been involved with hobby-grade RC since 1993, which means the vehicles that were brand new when I was a kid are now very much vintage machines. And ’93 itself is modern compared to some of the vehicles (and racers!) in this scene. That sentence hurts a little bit to type, but here we are.

A lot of the people who grew up staring at these cars in hobby shops are now adults with the ability to actually own the stuff they wanted back then. Maybe you had an RC10 as a kid and want to race one again. Maybe you desperately wanted one but couldn’t afford it. Maybe you just remember seeing a Falcon, Blackfoot, Optima, Ultima, JXRT, RC10 or whatever your particular object of desire was sitting on the shelf at your local hobby shop.

Now you can experience those vehicles again, and increasingly you can actually do something with them once they’re built.

That’s the part of the current vintage boom that I find the coolest. These cars aren’t just being preserved and sat on shelves. They’re being used. In many cases used HARD!

They’re getting built, modified, tuned, raced, crashed, repaired, and raced again. Companies are producing bodies, wheels, tires, and hop-ups for platforms that were designed decades ago. Manufacturers like Tamiya and Team Associated continue bringing old names back into circulation, which introduces these vehicles to people who may not have even been alive when the originals were released.

We talked about re-releases here last week, and right on cue Tamiya followed that column by announcing an updated Falcon that addresses some of the shortcomings of the original. (Ah yes, the poor Clod. All of the other re-re’s get issues updated or fixed it seems, save for it!)

But re-releases are really only one part of what’s happening here.

What’s more interesting to me is the culture that’s grown around all of it. When a vintage race in Las Vegas can fill my social media feed with people traveling there specifically to participate, we’re well beyond a few old guys being nostalgic about the cars they had as kids.

It makes me happy that many folks out there seem to think that the ultimate expression of appreciation for these machines isn’t necessarily putting them behind glass. It’s putting them on a track.

I love seeing a beautifully restored vintage RC sitting on a shelf as much as anybody, and there are certainly rare vehicles where preservation makes sense. But there’s something special about seeing these old designs doing what they were created to do. An RC10 battling another RC10 around a track is more interesting to me than seeing either one sitting perfectly untouched on a shelf.

And thanks to the current support for vintage RC, you don’t necessarily have to risk some irreplaceable 40-year-old survivor to experience that anymore. Re-releases, reproduction parts, and modern aftermarket support can let people enjoy the old-school experience without feeling like every trip into the pipe could destroy an artifact.

Maybe that’s why this particular corner of the hobby seems to have found such a sweet spot.

There’s the nostalgia, obviously. But there’s also competition, building, tuning, collecting, history, and community all wrapped up together. Someone can show up because they remember racing these cars in 1988, while somebody else can show up because they simply think old RC10s look cool.

Both belong there.

Seeing all those pictures from Vegas also made me realize that I’d really like to attend one of these big vintage events myself sometime. Not necessarily because I’m suddenly planning some serious vintage racing campaign, but because these events increasingly look like celebrations of RC history where the history is still running (and some legendary drivers are doing the wheeling!).

That’s a pretty neat thing.

Our hobby changes constantly. Technology gets better, vehicles get faster, and today’s latest-and-greatest eventually winds up becoming yesterday’s old junk.

Give it enough time, though, and apparently yesterday’s old junk gets a fresh set of tires, a new battery, and a starting position in Vegas.

I love that.

Alright, that’s it for me this week. Until next time, keep it on all 4’s!