ASK Cubby, Version- Ho Ho Ho, Merry Questions, Scrooge Answers

“What car for 2016?

Hi Cubby, I’m Bjorn from Milan, Italy and I’m one of the founder of our local bashing club, aka the “2040 Reparto Corse”. We’re a few guys that loves to bash hard with our r/c cars and then to make some video of our adventures for our blog.

First of all I wish to thank you and all the Big Squid guys for the reviews and the advices we can find on your beautiful website! Last summer we’ve sent a few video for your Big Squid/Pro-Line contest. We had no lucky….but yeah we had a lot of fun!!!;-)

As you can see in This Video we already have a lot of small cars: a 1/18 Mini Recon, a Latrax Teton, a LaTrax SST, four Traxxas mini e-revo, one mini Slash, an HPI Savage XS plus two 1/10 ARRMA buggies (a Raider and an ADX) and several drift/touring cars. Our favorite places are skateparks, parking lots, construction sites and…you know, all that places where you can seriously abuse of your car but…here in Italy we don’t have all the space you’ve in the States, so here is THE question: what car should we buy for our 2016 season? The 1/8 scale is too big for us, but we would like to test some 1/10 bashing monsters like the ARRMA Granite or the Pro-Line MT…what do you think?

Thank you very much, best regards and Merry Christmas!!!

Bjorn”

Cubby- Yooooo hey Bjorn, Merry Christmas to you as well. Hopefully you can have a huge Christmas meal then get in some trigger time with a brand spank’n new bash truck of some sort. Oh and… Tifosi FOREVER!

To get to the question at hand, what would I recommend for an epic/gnar-core 10th scale bash machine? Wow, there are a ton to pick from, but here would be a couple of my favorites.

1. Yes, the Pro-Line PRO-MT is the cat’s meow. It was our bash vehicle of the year last year for good reason, it just plain kicks ass. It handles well, it can take a lot of power, and it can take some big hits without much breakage. Pretty much everything you want in an uber-basher.

2. On the other side of the spectrum, a good 4wd, one like the Vaterra Halix or Traxxas Stampede 4×4, will allow for more radical backflip action. Neither of those trucks come with a center diff, making them backflip/frontflip monsters. The Halix is a bit more trick but needs some upgrades out of the box compared to the Pede, but both are quite epic 10th scale bashers when set-up correctly.

Peace and love my friend, peace and love…

“What’s UP with that review?

I just got done reading your review of the Traxxas X-Maxx and it made me wonder, since when do you love Traxxas so damn much?

Todd R.”

Cubby- Heyyyyy now Todd, Merry Christmas to you and thanks for the email.

So… since when did I fall in love with Traxxas? If you’ve followed me for any time now, you already know how critical I have been on the Texas giant. And it’s not that I hate them, it’s more that my job is to be a whiny a-hole, therefore I am quite critical on pretty much everyone when they deserve it. Now, there are some companies out there that I really, really dislike. But even then, when it comes to review time, myself and the rest of the bash crew attempt to throw all that mental garbage out the window and give criticism, and praise, where it is warranted.

For example, I am not a fan of RedCat, but the last truck of theirs that we reviewed was awesome, therefore it got a great score. RedCat isn’t an advertiser, nor will they probably ever be, so we had nothing to gain by giving a RedCat an artificially good score. We did that RedCat review for our readers. We know a whole lot of BSRC readers buy RedCat products, therefore we thought it was about time that we did another review on one of their products.

In the case of the X-Maxx, Traxxas is like RedCat in the aspect that they’ve never been an advertiser of ours, nor will they probably ever be. They didn’t give us an X-Maxx, we paid cash money out of our own pocket for our review truck, so it’s not like they gave us an $800 truck so we felt obligated to give it a good score. The X-Maxx got a great score in our review because our test crew loved the truck. I was perhaps the person most against it, but guys like Iron Mikeee and Robbie G absolutely loved it. For what bashers typically do, things like popping wheelies, hitting big jumps, and blasting through mud holes, the X-Maxx did a great job. So no matter how much I might not like a company, I would never hold it against one of their products during a review.

And lastly… it also goes the other way. I am a huge fan of Axial products and they are an advertiser of ours. However, that doesn’t mean they get a free pass. If anything, we’ve been extra hard on them to show our readers that all the money and politics don’t mean a dern thing once we hit our local track or park and start working on a review.

Merry Christmas, go huge, break lots of parts.

So there ya have it, yet another edition of ASK Cubby. Shoot me an email at thecubreportrc at gmail dot com. It can be a question, a rant, whatever really, and if it hits our front page you’ll win a free BSRC sticker pack. Next week I’ll be awarding a “Letter of the Month”, with the winner getting one of our uber t-shirts, so get those letters in now.

YOUR Cub Reporter