Growing buggies

[kink]

Back in the day 1/10 scale rc cars were fairly compact, with small diameter wheels, short wheel bases, narrow tracks. Things remained like this all through the 1980s.

Then out of the blue manufacturers started bringing out extra long wheelbase conversions for racing buggies, such as the CAT and Optima Mid etc. In retrospect all the original compact buggies become labelled as SWB. All the new cars become the new long standard.

Next wheels diameters became larger and the cars got wider and wider. So in essence we were back to square one, with cars having the same ball park ratio of length v width v tyre size. All that really happened is original 1/10 buggies scaled up to become 1/9 scale buggies, in all but name. So it became rather pointless to me.

So do you think this will start to happen all over again? Perhaps buggies will start to get longer, wider, with even bigger wheels.

I have to say I much prefer the older cars for looks.



Over to you guys for general thoughts and discussion...

[kaiser]

personally my real rc enjoyment started with the jrx2. i had only owned tamiya cars prior to that and while they were fun for a while the poor handling got boring. (unless there was snow on the ground,my buddies and i always ran in the snow)

i got bitten by the racing bug with a tamiya blackfoot in the "truck" class that predates stadium trucks. while that racing was fun, again the issue of handling and constant breakages took away from that fun.

then the long arm jrx2 came out and my real addiction to racing and race bred cars came to life. shortly after that i picked up a used short arm gold pan and got to work on that, mip gearbox, andy's arms and so on.

so i guess what i'm trying to say is i love the way rc evolved. i don't think the cars will get any bigger. we already have 1/8. jconcepts tried 1/9 with the j82 and that didn't take off. i doubt true 1/9 race buggies will take over.
from a racers point of veiw now is a great time to be racing 1/10. i mean have you seen the recent surge of 1/10 2wd race buggies that have come out in the past year?
it's kind of crazy, and i'm enjoying it.

[Coelacanth]

I'm with you on this one, kink. Cars looked better, more proportionally accurate back in the 80's to early 90's. Of course it's no Einsteinian breakthrough that cars with the same scale but relatively longer wheelbases, lower-profile wheels & tires, and wider tracks will handle better. Duh. What ends up happening is you get cars that just look weird. The cars I see nowadays are sleek, sure, but they look like rolling letter H's, with extra-long control arms, big low-profile tires, long chassis' and the body? Hell, they bear no resemblance whatsoever to real cars, and fit so tight to the chassis that they might as well not even BE bodies. All they are is painted dust-covers. Moreover, a good percentage of cars out there are just copycats of each other, making them somewhat indistinguisable when they fly past.

At least the Bulldog-style bodies are bodies, but they also bear no resemblance to their full-scale offroad counterparts.

I'm not a form-before-function kinda guy, but both aesthetics and a nod to realism SHOULD play at least a small role in a car's design.

[Phin]

Have ya seen the Traxxas 1/10 Rally.

They put what's clearly a 1/8 rally car body on their 1/10 scale SC truck.

[jwscab]

couple of observations regarding wheels and wheel bases.

who is to say what it actually 1/10 scale? wheelbases for 1:1 cars are all over the map, certainly a smart car is a 1:1 scale, but then so is something like a 75 cadillac eldorado(I dunno...22-23 ft long?), the smart car could fit in the trunk of the cadillac. so it's kind of open to interpretation.

the most 'true' scale vehicles would be tanks, and crawlers, those truck bodies that are available are just awesome. they have correspondingly accurate wheels and such, because they were designed to be 'scale' vehicles.

as far as wheels go, it's the same principle as 1:1 cars. a 57 chevy looks silly on 20" or 22" wheels, but some people do it. most cars for that matter do, but it's a matter of preference.

the 1/10 buggy tires started out like the older 1.5" and 1.7" wheels(15' and 17" 1:1), and ballooned up to 2.2", just like the 1:1 cars did. however the main difference is those buggies benefit from the shorter tire for traction conditions for a race environment.

[peetbee]

I think it's even more noticable in the 'Micro' class within the UK. It started out as 1/18 scale with correspondingly sized wheels and gradually grew and grew until the '1/16' scale cars are the same width as 1/10 touring cars, run 1/10 touring car wheels and the wheelbase is only fractionally shorter.
What can't be denied though is that they handle far better than the earlier cars, the same applies to the 1/10 cars you are referring to. Racing creates that development, however, I can't see it changing in the future unless the organising bodies increase the maximum dimensions as most cars are right on that limit now.