THE Cub Report, Version- Crazy As Len Koenecke
Ever see an empty flying field? How about a nearly empty track with 10 people, each running 4 classes for “40 entries”? How about that rocky area of your local park that used to have 10 guys crawling on the weekend, now it is lucky if 1 or 2 shows up? Seriously folks, we gotta stop running people off.
Why do I say that? Because last weekend one of “our” BSRC guys was run off a local flying field (and no, not the field in the picture above), something I’ve seen time and time again.
Our own 3D Bill was at a local field in Chi-Town over the weekend and was told he couldn’t fly his quad on the “airplane” field. That makes absolute sense if there were actually airplanes there, but there were none. On one of the best weather Saturday’s that Chicago has had in a long time, 3DB was told he could not fly on an empty airfield. Wanna guess if he is ever going back? Wanna guess if he is ever going to recommend that field to any of his friends?
I vividly remember “back in the day” when the T-maxx first came out. I remember each and every weekend a half dozen new T-Maxx pilots would come down to race at my local track, but they were always turned away because “We don’t have a monster truck class here!”. That happened for months upon months upon months. I often wonder how many noobs were turned sour to racing rc cars because my local track was “too serious” to allow a monster truck class. Frankly, back at that time (and some say still), Traxxas cars were not considered race worthy and my local club guys wouldn’t think of letting them run on a track that normally only contained Kyosho/Mugen/etc 8th scale buggies. Wanna guess how many of those T-Maxx guys I ever saw come back with a Kyosho? That’s right, zero.
Last fall I was at one of my local parks that has a nice expanse of rocks that runs alongside a small stream. It was nicely shaded, right by the highway, and was generally a perfect place to get some trail driving and/or crawling in. I brought two of my buddies to the spot to give them a chance to run with other guys in the scale crowd, figuring they would have the time of their lives. At that time there would be anywhere from 10 to 20 guys showing up on a typical Saturday, and that particular day was no exception. Unfortunately, a couple of the regulars were dicks about my friends running box stock Axial trucks. They basically told them that their tires weren’t good enough, their bodies weren’t scale enough, and how they really needed to spend a grand on their trucks before they even thought about running them off-road. Now… even a bone stock Axial can take on some pretty burly trails, and be a hoot while doing so, but nonetheless my buddies never returned to that spot. When I drove by that local park yesterday guess how many people I saw? Zero, nada, none. It seems that the 2 a-holes in the group managed to run every single person off.
To boil it down, we really gotta stop running people off. Some of course deserve it, if you flip out cursing and throwing a transmitter, you deserve a perma-ban, but a person should be allowed to fly a quad on an empty airfield. A class should be made for any group of guys that show up at a track, and every guy that shows up at a local bash spot should be received with a warm welcome, regardless of what brand, or how much his equipment cost.
That’s it for this week, be nice to your fellow hobbyists, and hit up your LHS and local bash spots when ya can.
YOUR Cub Reporter
