Electric Has Taken Over But Nitro Will Never Die

Electric Has Taken Over But Nitro Will Never Die

When I started racing, I was a big fan of electric power, but I was young and didn’t know if I could handle the challenge of a nitro engine. The Team Associated RC10 GT floored me when I saw it for the first time and just had to have one. Having such an awesome truck made determined to learn how to tune that engine. I watched the video that came with the truck over and over again and well, still blew up my first engine. After a little machine work and time I moved on to a .15 engine (they called the one I had a big block .15 because the piston and sleeve were housed inside a big block case) and it ran very well. I’ve been running nitro ever since. Well, with the invention of LiPo batteries and brushless power, electric vehicles have more than taken over and I have less people to race with. I think we also have rock crawling and short course trucks to thank for that as well. And yes, I too have been bitten by the electric bug a bit but nitro power will always be on the top of my fun list. I don’t care how advanced electric power gets, you can never beat nitro. The smell of the exhaust is awesome and there’s something really cool about seeing that smoke puffing out of the body. The only time you get smoke out of your electric stuff is when you blow it up and it doesn’t even smell good. I enjoy racing at Pin Shop Hobbies in the summer time and we run electric 1/8-scale with the nitro guys which is a bit of a bummer. If it rains the electric guys are out because their priceless electronics may be damaged by the water so we don’t have a lot of guys to run against when that happens. And since you can’t easily replace a battery during a race our mains area kept short. See, so what does electric power get you over nitro? More speed? That’s not much of an advantage if you ask me. Long live nitro!

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Updated: June 16, 2015 — 9:08 AM
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