Flashback: RC Car Action May 1994

Were you reading RC Car Action 22 years ago? Maybe you remember pulling this issue out of your mailbox. Nitro-powered RC was on the rise back in ’94, led by our cover star, Team Associated’s best-selling RC10GT.

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An RC10GT wearing a Motion Graphics paint job–it doesn’t get much more ’90s than that. Associated was still a few years away from going to black plastic, and the GT was molded mostly in natural-color plastics. Bust out your fabric dye…

 

Here’s how RC’s top gas truck looked in its ad. Associated always had great “studio action” shots.

 

Before we launched the Readers’ Choice Awards, we did this “Top 10” thing. Some classics here…

 

Mugen Athlete, Traxxas gas buggy, and a BMT…we forgot some of these cars existed!

 

Ever seen a Bolink Digger in action? It’s bananas.

 

We covered Joe McGregor’s Insame Speed Run car, which lapped a bicycle velodrome at the then-astounding average speed of 87.4mph. An 18-cell, 1000mAh battery dumped 21.6 volts into an Aveox brushless system, one of the earliest appearances of brushless power in RCCA.

 

The great touring car boom had yet to explode, but the fuse was burning with Tamiya’s TA-series cars–here, a red-hot Alfa.

 

Remember comm lathes? If you were racing mod in the mid-90s, you either had one or your racin’ buddy did. These things are relics now.

 

Kyosho’s Tracker got the “Track Report” treatment. It was basically an Ultima with a body, wheel and tire swap. Sure looks good though.

 

Another blast from the past, Dahm’s bodies. Ira Dahm always had unique designs. And how about that Apex 10? Nitro pan cars were briefly a thing back in the 90s. This one is basically a Bolink Sport modded to hold an engine in the rear pod.

 

Frequent contributor Mike Ogle offered a two-parter on building up a Parma-bodied roadster. Check out that “barn find” pic. Weathering and rust just like today’s scalers!

 

The always-fashionable Joel Johnson, repping Trinity. Joel was the face of the brand for quite a while. “Buy these Sanyo 1700 matched cells.”

 

Losi’s Junior cars were hot entry-level racers, and shared a lot of DNA with the Pro SE and LXT models of the time–which the new Double-X platform was rapidly making obsolete.

 

Ah, the Losi Double-X. This machine rocked the 2WD buggy scene when it appeared in 1994. After nearly a decade of RC10-vs-JRX, Losi had an all-new buggy on the battlefield. It looks stone-age now, but back then it was the future.

 

With the Double-X hitting tracks, we decided to compare the last-gen JRX-Pro SE against Losi’s latest, head to head.

 

We miss you, Novak. The brand was in peak form in the mid-90s, when kits still dominated and that meant you needed to buy a speed control. The rugged Rooster was a popular choice. Anyone else miss big anodized heatsinks and graphics on speed controls? Today’s units don’t look half as cool.

 

No internet, no Ebay, and no one wanted old cars. America’s Hobby Center was blowing out Tamiya Egresses for $99! They later went down to $88. What would you pay for a shrink-wrapped, new-in-box Egress today?

 

What’s on sale at Tower? Bust out your credit card and call the 800 number if you want a Magnum AM radio, those sweet 1500mAh NiCds or that LX-T with the XX tranny. TowerHobbies.com was still way off.

 

Trinity was pushing hard in pan cars with the Evolution- and Revolver-series cars. Joel Johnson at it again. Note the “Proud Sponsor of PROCAR” burst too. There’s a story…

 

If you were serious about racing in ’94, you probably had a Caliber 3P. Just about any radio with a screen you can buy today has more features than the 3P, but back then, this was some serious Buck Rogers stuff.

 

And if you didn’t have an Airtronics Caliber, you had one of these: the Magnum FM “brick,” or the PCM version if you were super-cool. This bad boy is 100% analog, you can see the tiny potentiometers and DIP switches hiding behind the front cover.

 

MRC’s World Scale concept was on the back cover for a long run of issues in the mid-90s. The big cars (about 1/7 scale) would probably be a hit today, now that we have the brushless and LiPo tech the cars really needed.