THE Cub Report, Version 11.29.09
Welcome to yet another wonderful edition of THE Cub Report, the opinion piece that keeps industry types constantly hitting the refresh button. 🙂
Did you see the press release on the latest offering from Axial? Hubba, hubba! Axials new truck is called the SCX10, and is perhaps the best looking truck released in years. It’s intended for the crawling crowd, but its authentic scaling and trick looks will surely attract a much wider spread of the market.
Speaking of “scale” appearance- it’s seems our favorite sanctioning body wants all the body manufactures to start producing more “realistic” bodies in the truggy class. Now, since when has a truggy ever looked even faintly realistic? Why now should the bodies look more realistic while their wheels, tires, suspension, and ever other components can look like they were designed by a martian? Will a more realistic bodied truggy even enhance racing? I believe more scale realism will lead to more mainstream acceptance of our hobby, but that means the entire car/truck has to look scale, not just it’s body. The trend towards realism is good for our hobby, lets hope the sanctioning bodies get on board with more support of this trend. It might tick off the hard core racers (the type that run off noobs anyways) for a while, but the masses will come, and the increased revenue will be appreciated by everyone making a living in this hobby.
Brian hates it when I give props to any of the print rags, but this week I just have to. Once again the guys over at RC Car have put out a mag worth spending the $5 on. In their January issue, they have two outstanding interviews. The first is with the whole crew from AKA tires– Gil Jr, Pops, Joel Johnson, and Mark Pavidis. The second interview is from Jay Thames, the guy that did the docu/film about carpet racing called “Carpet Racers: A Crash Course“. You won’t find interviews like these in the other rags, and both only have one downside, they just aren’t long enough. Both interviews are good reading, something rarely found in the rc rags these days.
Once again, if you are a battery or charger manufacture, and want to be included in the next BigSquidRC shootouts, be sure and shoot us an email at Brian at BigSquidRC.com to get complete info on how to be included. Looks like we’ve got some big names already lined up, brands that consumers are really interested in seeing tested, so readers rejoice, you are gonna dig the shootouts when we’re done.
As I was having an email exchange the other day with a friend of mine in the industry, we were discussing just how many different genres of cars and trucks there are on the market right now. Then the convo turned to what we both thought our “perfect” cars were. Strangely, even though there are dozens of different genres of cars already out there, nobody makes the two “perfect” cars that my friend and I would really prefer. So now I am asking you readers to submit to us what your “perfect” rc car would be. If it’s already on the market, don’t bother emailing us, but if your true “perfect” car is not out there, shoot us an email and let us know what is it. For instance, is your “perfect” car an 8th scale nitro 4wd crawler? A 12th scale 4wd short course truck? Let us know, and if we get enough responses I’ll post what the “most wanted but not produced” rc car is.
That’s it for this week, support your hobby, hit your LHS and local tracks, and most importantly, have fun playing with your toy cars and trucks.
Your Cub Reporter
