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The Backyard – A Lot About A Lot

Greetings all. It’s Friday and you know what that means- time for The Backyard. I don’t really have a through line this week as there are a variety of topics I want to discuss. Let’s get to it. RIP to Hall-of-Fame Monster Truck / BIGFOOT 4×4 Driver Dan Runte. There has been a lot written and posted about Dan on various [...]

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The Backyard – When Kits Take the Spotlight

Happy Friday all, welcome to The Backyard! The middle stretch of 2025 has looked a little different than usual in the RC world. Early in the year it was business as usual — a handful of flashy RTR bashers, some monster trucks, a crawler or two. The kind of stuff you’d expect to headline the news cycle. But somewhere around late Spring/early [...]

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The Backyard – Golden Age Colors Never Fade

Happy Friday all and welcome to The Backyard! This week Team Associated announced another version of their RC10GT stadium truck – the 1/10 RC10GT Richard Saxton Edition Kit, and once again it’s wearing that classic look from RC’s golden age. It’s hard not to smile when you see those old-school stripes and sponsor splashes come alive on a brand-new kit. I mean [...]

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The Backyard – End of Summer Trip with a Land Rover

Greetings all and Happy Friday! Welcome to The Backyard. One of the things I love about this hobby is how it tends to creep into everyday life. Vacations, weekends at the lake, camping trips — RC always seems to find its way into the packing list. Next week I’m heading down to Branson, Missouri, for a little time at a cabin [...]

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The Backyard - I'm Shocked that R/C Rally Racing Isn't More …

Happy Friday all, and welcome to The Backyard! We didn’t have a ton of new news this week in the r/c-sphere, so I wanted to share a take that I’ve been sitting on since we did our review of the Rlaarlo 1/12  XTS-P12 Rally Car in early July and discuss r/c rally racing. I am seriously shocked that in 2025, organized R/C [...]

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The Backyard – One Week, Three Ways to Have Fun in RC

From high-end crawling to big-air bashing to small-scale monster trucking, the RC world is starting to hum again with new releases as we head into Fall! This is great to see, because after the blitz of new releases in Winter/Spring, it was a VERY dry Summer. Let’s take a look at some of the releases from the last week! The Vanquish [...]

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The Backyard – Everything’s Coming Up Camel Yellow

If you’ve been paying attention, you might’ve noticed something funny happening at Team Associated HQ lately — a sort of… golden renaissance. But not the kind that involves a classic gold-pan buggy tearing around a track. No, this one’s painted on. I’m talking, of course, about Camel Yellow. The color. The vibe. The legacy. Over the past few weeks, Associated has been [...]

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The Backyard – RIP Mr. Tamiya

The RC world lost a true giant last week with the passing of Shunsaku Tamiya, the longtime chairman of Tamiya. Even if you’ve never touched a tube of cement or hand-painted a 1/35 tank commander, if you’re into radio control, odds are this man’s work touched your life — and your wallet — at some point. Mr. Tamiya didn’t just run [...]

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The Backyard: RTRs Are Better Than Ever — So Why Are the S…

Happy Friday all! Welcome to The Backyard! Let’s start with the obvious: Ready-To-Run vehicles today are lightyears better than what we had even a decade ago. You can walk into a hobby shop, drop a few hundred bucks, and walk out with a machine that looks amazing, runs fast, and can (usually) take a decent beating. But despite all the advancements, two [...]

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The Backyard - The Local Hobby Shop is Still the Best Place …

Greetings all, happy Friday and welcome to the Backyard! This week I wanted to write something for the prospective noob who is thinking of getting into the hobby! So, you’ve decided to dive into the RC world — congrats! You’re about to discover the joy of speed, tinkering, and breaking tiny vehicles in spectacular fashion. But before you go all-in with [...]

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The Backyard – Art of the Thrash

Hello everyone and Happy 4th of July to those of you readers in the States! The topic this week- the thrash. What is a thrash? Many racers will know! This is when you suffer breakage during a round/heat and face a time deadline (usually the next round) to have the vehicle repaired and back on track. Usually this involves some kind [...]

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The Backyard – Beefing up my TLR LMT

Greetings all and welcome to The Backyard! A couple weeks back I took part in the annual BIGFOOT 4×4 Open House r/c race, and it came up on me so fast that I didn’t really write about any of my own personal r/c monster trucks that I competed with! I raced my Rotten Ol’ Apple Retro Clod Buster and my Rotten Apple [...]

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The Backyard – BIGFOOT Open House Ruled

Hey everyone, Happy Friday and welcome to The Backyard! Last weekend BIGFOOT 4×4 held their 50th Anniversary Open House at their shop in Pacific, MO, and it was an absolute blast. There was action everywhere. An insane amount of full scale monster trucks showed up, whether it was modern race trucks (various BIGFOOT trucks, High Roller, and Gunslinger), or classic iron (various [...]

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The Backyard - All Aboard for the 2025 BIGFOOT 4x4 Open Hous…

Happy Friday all and welcome to The Backyard! This weekend I’m dusting off my solid axle monster trucks and helping the Trigger King R/C guys put on a race at the annual BIGFOOT 4×4 Open House! The BIGFOOT 4×4 Open House, taking place at the team’s shop in Pacific, MO, is set to be an exciting event celebrating 50 years of the [...]

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The Backyard – Everything’s Gonna Be Alright

Greetings all and Happy Friday! Welcome to The Backyard! We started off 2025 with a freakin’ insane amount of releases. Nearly every week we had a big r/c kit announcement! Since early April though, it’s been a bit of a ghost town. Part of this is no doubt because a lot of stuff had just been announced by a lot of companies, [...]

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