On Friday nights my Brother Paul and mates Ray and Steve race 1/10th scale electric touring cars at Horsham club. I started when Paul and Ray clubbed together to buy me a slightly used Schumacher SST.
These miniature racing cars can teach you a lot about how cars behaves to modifications to steering and suspension. All the data collected has helped me understand how full size cars works at a greatly reduced cost.
Other technology learnt has been about how electric motors really work and how to get the best out of them.
Oh, and there was some racing too, with trophies!
Next came a big upgrade in the form of a bargain sourced on www.racingmart.co.uk
£90 for this lot!
Including my new race car:
Major differences are all the purple alloy bits and the wider stiffer top deck.
After stripping it, cleaning everything and careful rebuilding I took it for my first ever outdoor meeting at Shoreham with the Adur club.
There I managed to qualify 5th for the A final and ended up 4th! What a result. Special thanks to Graham Hurley for selling me his old Take Off CS22 tyres which gripped almost as well as foams on carpet.
Since then I have finished 3rd in my second race there after qualifying 4th and vastly improved my performances indoors with a couple of B final wins and two A final qualifications. All this against some very trick XRays and TC3s which feels great :-)
August 2003 and the time has come to up the ante. No more Mr Nice Guy (or, as Liam put it, no more hair shirt!!!)
Liam is the very nice man from whom I bought my first seriously competetive car:
It's an RC-Labs (who?) 7even Evo/1. Don't ask me what the model designations mean, I have no idea. It's not stock, has had various tweaks made and it goes like stink. I just need to learn how to drive again. It's a lot less forgiving than my Schumacher and seems to have less grip but that's probably because it's sooooo much faster. Outdoors with the one-way front diff fitted it was the equal of any of the fast TC3s and XRays in a straight line and punching out of corners which I have never had before. I always had to make up time by being very neat on the infield sections. I can't seem to do that now the car is faster even though the steering is almost as good as my old SST
I have also taken the time to experiment with home made wings. The stock wings are merely moulded polycarbonate and not very aerodynamically efficient.
Using my experience at full size wing making this is what I came up with. It's still unpainted and a bit battered as I have been testing it's resilience over the last five race meetings. It's held up remarkably well I think.
It has a proper wing section too (Gottingen 225) 
Unfortunately they are banned from 1/10th touring racing so next came a wing for 1/5th scale cars which is a bit more practical due to the increase in size:
I have now decided to make these available to anyone who would like a "proper" airofoil section wing. As the rear wing is the primary source of downforce, the advantage on these 50mph cars will be significant.