TopCat at last!!! (New pics)

[Bormac]

The Topcat certainly was and still is a very iconic model. Remembering back to when Schumacher were releasing the 'all new 2WD Topcat' the press release had a car draped in white cloth only hinting on the cars shape.
I remember my first look at one of these cars was at the 89 Worlds final day in Sydney. The inboard shocks were like nothing I had ever seen before and until i got a nib kit a couple of years back I hadnt really seen one since.
The car was revolutionary for its time I believe as there was nothing out there quite like it and its cool features must have been a real selling point.
Having driven a couple of these cars now on an assortment of tracks i will say that I find the front end doesnt hold corner speed too well and most other buggies beat it into and out of the corners. Secondly I have found the front end lacks the ability to recover well from any descent jump and Ive found the front suspension can come unstock with debri driven up into the front end tends to foul things up a little.
Now I dont want my fellow Schuey friends to think Im selling out on the topcat but in my opnion I have found only these areas as minor problems. Schumacher obviously worked out the cars short comings and quickly redisgned the front end and thus the Cougar was born. This changed everything! Now the car could hold a decent line into and out of a corner while the upright shocks aided recovery from large jumps.
I find the transmission to be a little different from any other manufacturers design but it definately works. My transmissions all seem to work very smoothly and efficiently.

Looking back I think the Topcat was built for the U.K and European market and they did well there and in Australia also. America has always been well known for their jumps and its obvious the RC10 was designed from the ground up to perform especialy well on these tracks. I think you'll find some cars perform better on some tracks than others and vice-versa. I guess its just up to the driver ( or enthusiast) to decide which car is suited to them.

I own 4 Topcat's now and i wouldn't part with one of them. Along with the Procat thse cars have grown to be amongst my very favourites.

[minichamps11]

Looking back I think the Topcat was built for the U.K and European market and they did well there and in Australia also. America has always been well known for their jumps and its obvious the RC10 was designed from the ground up to perform especialy well on these tracks. I think you'll find some cars perform better on some tracks than others and vice-versa. I guess its just up to the driver ( or enthusiast) to decide which car is suited to them.

Good post Jason, I agree with everything you've said. Interestingly your point about being designed for a specific market applies to full size car manufacturers too. Very loosely speaking, German cars tend to have great high speed refinement and stability, but have a poor ride on UK roads due to their stiff "sporting" suspension setup. French cars tend to have a lovely ride but aren't the last word in sporting handling etc etc.

Schumacher most definitely designed the Topcat for UK tracks in the 80's. It's only in recent years that tracks such as Stotfold & Eden Park have been redesigned with bigger jumps, but they're still way behind US tracks for air-time

I've got a few Topcats and love them for their innovative design & the fact that they were Schumachers first 2WD. However I've noticed the second hand cars I've picked up seem to break the front bulkhead easily and they must have been difficult to keep the front suspension free running on a dirt track. Despite being almost as big a Schumacher fan as Jeroen & Jason, I'd be the first to admit that Schumacher 2WD cars were never as successful as their 4WD cars.. here's hoping the CAT SX is destined for big things (and their new mid-engined 2WD as well..)

[delsami]

any pics of a new 2wd. i never heard anything about it.

what also hurt schumacher in the u.s.a. is the extemely layed down shocks and lack of a slipper on some models like the usa edition fireblade. very cool cars though and i agree they were out of there element.

[peuge73]

About the top cat and schumacher productions at this time, I would ad this:
I really think that this manufacturer has produced a lot of very original solutions. It was the "challenger", and had to care to get the first place. Schum did not have plenty of top drivers all over the world, like Asso did.
It was the team to see if you wanted to discover new technical issues.
What was great to see also that each tested solution in top racing were immediately delivered in the selled production kits. The only thing was that they had a new car all years, or nearly: Top cat / cougar1/ cougar2/ cougar2 team / cougar 2 works had all raced again RC10...but inbetween if you owned an Asso, you could follow the evolution just buying extra market parts.
For me, schumacher had worked a lot to investigate technical solutions.
At that time, if you were interested in having just fun and racing, you should have drive an Asso...if you were interested in mechanics and engineering, then you should have experimented a schum!
With the RC10: fun on the sunday on the track, and keep the car in the box for one week.
With the top cat: hard sundays to set up the car and take care not to break it, and one week fun in mechanics!!!!!!

NB: I started with a top cat (one year), and then I kept the asso production for 3 years, but I always had a look on the schumacher cars of my friends.

[Bormac]

Having run a few of my Topcats here in Australia in vintage competition racing over the past couple of years Im still yet to break something on these cars. My friends Antony,Thomas and Scott here also run their Topcats too and i dont think there has been a breakage amongst them. The transmissions are very good and when the car is set up correctly they do hold their own but mostly on tracks without super jumps. I would say that in the right hands a Topcat 'CAN' be driven well against any other old car but the set up is crucial.

In favour of any of the old RC10's I would say that they almost drive themselves. The design was so close to perfect that even a novice can get good results-(i know Ive seen it for myself). The debate as to what car was better I guess depends on how much of a challenge you enjoy when it comes to competing versus the wonder of mechanical design. For me the RC10 is a little plain and while it is quite possibly the best performing 2WD of its time ( and indeed would still be competitive today against the modern stuff) I just prefer to take the road a little less travelled. I after all enjoy the struggle of getting a car to work when the odds are stacked against me. Thats just me though....

[delsami]

i know i am on the schumacher forum and maybe i should not be. i noticed that everybody that sticks up for these cars is in europe/australia ect. here in the usa you fight a uphill battle at all times with a schu that is not worth it just to have a pretty car. you can make these cars work but why. in my 20 years of racing, schumacher has been a joke around here.
i think you care about what side of the pond it is made on more than anything else including performance. I can't lie though, i love associated and losi because they are built in my country.

[Bormac]

Pretty bold statement DELSAMI.
I guess different cars are better suited to a particular style of racing and you'll find each manufacturer used to build a car which best suited its home turf back then. Im sorry you think the Schueys are a joke over there but Im sure you'll find drivers of both vintage and modern day off roaders that would argue just as strong of a case. Sure, the Losi's and AE's have shown great results over there in the states but that doesnt make them the only choice for racers and enthusiasts over the globe.
As for fighting an uphill battle, well I'd rather win driving the car i like rather than the car that is commonly found to be the easiest to drive/race. Same racers wont drive anything other than what the rest of the crowd drives with, in fear they wont be able to duplicate a winning setup from someone else. Personaly i like my results to be a reflection of my own tuning and driving skills and not that taken from someone elses hard work.
The Schueys have been ace for me and they perform very well here on tracks that reflect much of what you have over there. Even managed a win in last years vintage 4 hour endurance meeting down at Knox/Melbourne. My car was one of very few that didnt brake a thing and got my team over the line in first place.

[minichamps11]

i know i am on the schumacher forum and maybe i should not be. i noticed that everybody that sticks up for these cars is in europe/australia ect. here in the usa you fight a uphill battle at all times with a schu that is not worth it just to have a pretty car. you can make these cars work but why. in my 20 years of racing, schumacher has been a joke around here.
i think you care about what side of the pond it is made on more than anything else including performance. I can't lie though, i love associated and losi because they are built in my country.

Think a lot of it depends on what you raced / wanted when you were younger. I'm a Schumacher fan first & foremost because they made my first proper (i.e. not Tamiya!) racing buggy. Schumachers made up 80% of the cars at the first meetings I raced at. Associated's were too expensive in the UK in 80/90's compared to UK manufacturers. If they had been cheaper, I'd probably have got one of them and then I'd be an Associated fan instead.

Losi 1/10th cars are currently going through a "joke" phrase in the UK. First the team drivers dropped the newer XXX4 in favour of a 9 year old car (XX4). Then 2 years ago 90% of the top drivers left Losi to race for other manufacturers. Now you're lucky to see a XXX-CR at a race meeting & I haven't seen anyone use a XXX-4 for about 3 years now. The XX4 was popular until recently but most of them seem to be converted to X5's now.

Back to Schumacher - I can see why they might not be supported well in the U.S. They are not the easiest company to get information out of, and like Kyosho, they change parts constantly with little communication to customers to explain what the changes & why you need to buy these new parts. They also have a habit of releasing new versions of kits almost every year. This doesn't help brand image, money saving or race results, especially if you don't have any Team drivers near you to ask for advice.

Interesting you should call them "pretty" cars though, as that's one thing I wouldn't particularly say they are! The last really pretty Sch was the CAT XLS with the Cougar 2 a close second. The new SX is really horrible to look at........

[Mr. ED]

In our club no-one raced schumy. One day we had an open race and an antwerp club showed up with 90% schumy cars. I loved them and asked our chairman why we didn't have anyone racing them among our members.
He told me they were too fragile.
We got completely beaten that day (except for the lady driving the YZ-10) and broke just as many parts. What really made the difference in popularity back then at club levels I would say was the accesibility to parts.

The guys of the antwerp club had chairman carrying all parts in his mini-van. Our club had LHS in the area where they sold tamiya and a little kyosho stuff.
Same story later when it came off on Losi/Associated. In the end one importer got losi accesible, but if you needed anything you were done racing for a tleast 2 to 3 weeks. Even the guy he sponsored quit on Losi after he did well against the rc10's in his first year.
A couple years later Kyosho went through some troubles with distribution and hop, lots of people switching again and influencing choices of new starters.
Traxxas: same story: couple TX-1's in the belgian championships: all drivers from one club associated to a small shop importing Traxxas.

The net and webshops have changed things a lot but the influence of LHS on the local clubs is still strong: never seen so much tamiya fans and drivers as in Japan

[Bormac]

Great post Ian and Eric.
Having built and driven many of the cars that were around both pre and post 1990 and owning most of them at one time or another i can say for certain that the Schueys arent fragile. Ive been racing Topcat's, Cougar's, CAT's, Procat's and Bosscat's now in vintage competition over the past couple of years and I cant remember braking anything. Add to this some of the rediculously high performance set ups ive been running and the proof is here.
All the early CAT's have 'crash back' front ends as does the TOPCAT. Ive been running 12 turn modern mod motors and even a 5.5 turn B/L set up and still Im yet to brake something on these cars. Sure, I could take any of these cars out into the street and hit a street pole,letter box or brick wall and brake something but thats not what these cars were designed to do. Schumacher are a race pedigree car and designed by Cecil Schumacher a well known Engineer in the U.K. who worked on formula 1 cars before turning to r/c. Clearly Cecil knew what he was doing and has developed a handful of cars well before their time.

[Mr. ED]

We didn't have bricks at the track, but the lanes were marked off with big rubber/textile hoses: firehoses? A lot of cars hit them straight on and broke stuff on the front. Didn't really matter what make you were driving

Another classic was to strip the drivebelt:especially in the days before the slipper became common.

EDIT: forgot to tell; 90% of our members never raced at big events and weren't what you'd call top-drivers

[delsami]

minichamps......i thought the fireblade was "pretty" no way you would catch me running it though..

different is not better, it is only different. if different was better it would no longer be different because everyone else would be doing it to.

overall, i understand thses cars were not designed for american tracks and parts availability is a major turnoff here. i agree with what is cool is what you liked as a kid. i feel this way about real cars also. you want the car that you couldn't have when you got your drivers license.

thanks for letting me say my part without hammering me to much guys.

[minichamps11]

minichamps......i thought the fireblade was "pretty" no way you would catch me running it though..

No one ran the Fireblade in the UK either if they could help it! That car sealed Schumacher's fate as far as 2WD buggies are concerned. It's no coincidence that their first new buggy for 7 years is 4WD. I don't really think Schumacher ever had a really competitive 2WD - the Cougar 2 Works was probably their best. From there onwards the cars first got more complicated (Cougar 2000), and then secondly cheaper and more frequently released as Schumacher aimlessly released one car after another trying to find a chassis that could compete with the B2/3 & Losi's... i.e. the Fireblade series which ended it's life with no slipper & plastic shocks. I'm surprised they bothered to sell it with ballraces.

thanks for letting me say my part without hammering me to much guys

I like to think that us Schumacher fans are honest, intelligent & like a fair debate

[8rad]

I have seen one pre C2K Schumacher at my club here in Canada. It was the early nineties and it was a lone Topcat. The field was all JRX PRO's and RC-10 CE's. The gentleman proceeded to dismantle the field and set a track record at the same time. I remember when he hit the big jumps it flew as if it had wings, danced through the bumps as if lighter than air and was SOOOOOO quiet. As a newcomer to RC I was mystified.

It matters not the brand but how you use it! Schumacher has never been popular around here because of cost and availability. PERIOD!

Losi enjoyed a lot of success because the cars were consistently good performers right out of the box, were more affordable and is what the LHS had on the shelf at the time.

More discerning enthusiasts were more likely to gamble on a schumacher because the additional cost and effort to get one set up just right might pay dividends(as demonstrated by my earlier story).

Don't get me wrong, I raced Losi for years for the reasons stated above.

But now I race Schuey because I like being different!

[Mr. ED]

Seen this is primarily a vintage forum... I think it is fairly normal to find lots of people here who like something 'different'.
I also like to own my own creations: not because they perform better than the others ('cause usually they don't ) but because they are unique, I made them and I got them to a certain level all by myself.