THE Cub Report – It’s Monday, It’s Cub Report Time

Yo, how ya been? Thanks for joining us on BigSquidRC for another Cub Report.

Word from the trenches is that the holiday season is off to a good start. No, stellar numbers aren’t going up, but the numbers are at least solid, with most of the people I talked to indicating that sales are up slightly from last year. That seems to be a good sign for the hobby, and believe me, at this point we are welcoming any good news we can get.

Scale, scale, and more scale. That seems to be the theme at two hobby shops I talked to over the weekend. The Traxxas TRX-4 is a big mover, as is the Redcat Gen7, the Vaterra K-10, etc. All three of those rigs are included in our scale crawler shootout, which Brian has been working his tail off on and should go up any day.

Also selling like hotcakes are introductory trucks like the brushed ARRMA Granite, ECX Ruckus, etc. That product segment is always a big seller, which has always amazing me. Some how, some way, our hobby keeps on pulling in the noobies. Having a constant influx of noobs is a great thing, now if we can do a better job of keeping people in the hobby…

Strangely, I have gotten back into a “track” sort of mood lately (thanks Andrew!). No, I haven’t been doing any racing, but I have been putting in a lot more time at tracks. After having spent over a decade living at them (read- practicing every day for 2-4 hrs), it is weird to start spending a lot of time back at them. Not a lot has changed of course. Bad drivers are still bad drivers, hot heads are still hot heads, and buggies still break when you tag the pipe at the end of the main straight. In fact, practicing more has showed me that a lot of people are doing what I am. They sure as heck aren’t gonna sign up on a legit race day, but love getting in laps and having informal races with their buddies on a practice day.

I have actually been seeing the exact same thing in motocross. My local mx tracks sure have a lot more practice day champions than they have race day participants. In mx, you’ve got amateur hardcore guys that do race, but most of them race to essentially prepare themselves for Loretta Lynn’s, something that we simply don’t have in rc. Loretta Lynn’s is the biggest amateur event in the country for motocross, come to think of it, rc could use the same thing, but of course that’ll never happen. In rc, everyone thinks they are hot on the tail of Brian Kinwald, therefore everyone that races is so close to “pro” caliber that there is simply no need for an amateur championship.

Any which way, I am in a rambling mood today. Thankfully our test crew is getting ready to leave for the track to finish up on our ARRMA Mega Fazon review. We’ll also be finishing up our review for the FPV enabled Dromida monster truck this week, as well as working on a Spektrum Active write-up. Yes, we are crazy busy here, all for your bashing enjoyment. With that said, get out and support your local hobby shops and bash spots when ya can.

YOUR Cub Reporter