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Just a quick question for everyone who restores vintage cars. Do you fix era correct radio gear for vintage shelters and runners or go with modern radio gear. I have a group now to clean up and have more than enough old radio gear. Cheers

For my runners I use a stick radio from the 90’ (Futaba 1024), modern servos and Li-Po batteries and for ESC I use LRP V8.1 (got 3 of those)

For shelf queens I think it should be period correct gear

Definitely upgrade the electrics if you're going to drive them. Much lower maintenance, better performance, easier setup and much better range. No need to mess around with frequency crystals. With LiPo battery technology, you won't have to worry about your NiCads or NiMH batteries slowly losing battery life over time. With even a cheap $40 transmitter, you can control up to 10 different receivers/cars. With 2.4 GHz receivers, you won't need foot-and-a-half-long antennae and fussing with threading receiver wires through long tubes. With brushless motors, you don't need to mess around rebuilding them, replacing brushes, adjusting endbell timing, etc...just plug 'em into your ESC and program the basics manually, or plug into a program card to access additional features.

If it's just going to sit on a shelf, period-correct electrics would probably be best.

I'm new and just tore apart my 87 Turbo Ultima and was asking myself the same questions. Thanks for the post, I'd like to see what everyone recommends. I think I'm going modern.

I keep a bunch of cars ready to go. When ever I get a good radio set, it gets put into a vintage car. For my main runners, I go modern 2.4ghz, brushless and lipo.