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Smartech Winner 1 Gas RC Car |
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More Driving, Spare Parts, Conclusions
I'm sure there are cars out there that are faster than this one, but they cost a fair bit more than the $300 or so including radio gear for the Smartech. Realistically, this car is already at the point where you have to really think about where to run it. A quiet street seems ideal, but you will be restricting yourself to long runs up and down the road - you can't really go too quickly across the street because you'll be into the gutter in no time. Sometimes when I'm out driving my van I find myself looking lustily at expanses of concrete and asphalt next to the road - carparks or basketball courts or whatever - mentally making a note to bring the RC car there sometime. Unless you live in a palace with a Grand Ballroom, I think indoor use is out of the question.
These things are magnets for kids and people. As I mentioned, I had a little trouble finding somewhere where I could really open the car up, but one of the local shops has a large tarmac carpark which is dead quiet during the middle of a weekday. After ten minutes of powering the car around, I had a small audience of people who had arrived for groceries or something, but were content to sit and watch the little car flying around. The same thing happened at a local skate park. Nobody there, play with car for two minutes, three kids appear from the woodwork and start asking where they can buy one.
You can actually run this car on dirt, but it has very limited suspension travel and isn't really designed for that kind of environment. That's not to say that hitting a bit of gravel next to the carpark isn't fun, though.
  
Grass of any length stops the car dead, because it lifts the wheels off the ground. If you do prefer to be off-road, ToyRange also bring in a buggy and a monster truck. For this road car, jumps are pretty much out of the question. The skate park was probably a bad idea, as I couldn't resist the temptation to go up the ramps and over the jumps, etc. Keeping the speed down is fine, but you will get air very easily if you give it even the slightest bit of throttle. A couple of badly-timed approaches had the car tumbling with no ill effects, but alas, eventually the car landed from a fair height onto the front-right quarter and broke the pin that holds the front wheel on. Silly me.
Spare Parts
The availability of spare parts is a very real concern for RC hobbyists. At one point or another your prized car or plane will smack into something tougher than itself, often the ground, and bits will break. One convention you come across when reading websites or magazines about remote-controlled hobbies is "LHS". As in, "get this from your LHS". No, it doesn't mean your Left-Hand Side, it means your Local Hobby Shop. Indeed, you will need to visit your LHS before you can use this car at all, as you'll need nitro fuel, a glow plug igniter and some batteries. Given that ToyRange are importing these cars directly, I wasn't too confident that my LHS would know anything about the Smartech brand. Fortunately, I was mistaken - the Smartech brand is quite well known in Australia, and my LHS, despite being quite a small one, carries spares and even entire cars. You can even get bits for them on Ebay. I ended up getting the bit I broke from ToyRange - $6 for a pair of wheel-mounting pins seems very reasonable, and now I have a spare. Fixing the car wasn't too difficult after I puzzled over the front suspension for a while - some allan keys and a philips-head screwdriver was needed.
ToyRange apparently have quite a few spare parts and accessories available now. You can apparently customise the car as well, replacing the suspension, putting on a different shell or nicer wheels, or even changing the motor as apparently the mounts are standard.
Speed, Range and Fail-Safe
ToyRange reckon this car is good for 50-60km/h and I don't doubt them, having run it along the pavement next to real cars doing about that speed. It depends on how you tune it and how long you give the car to get up to speed, of course. This brings up the next issue: range. I found with freshish batteries the car would respond up to about a 30M distance. That's not too bad, if you imagine a 30M-radius circle around yourself, it's a pretty big area to play in. But not really, when you realise the car can cover that distance in literally a few seconds. One issue with RC cars is how they behave when they reach the edge of the radio range and no longer receive signals from the controller. Ideally they stop, or just coast, so you can use the intermittently-received signal to coax them back towards you, or just walk nearer to them.
The worst scenario is where the throttle servo doesn't return automatically, and the car keeps accelerating. Unfortunately this is how the Smartech car behaves in stock form. If it is accelerating at full throttle away from you when it reaches the edge of radio range, it will keep going, at full tilt towards God-knows-what, while you fruitlessly run behind it. A similar thing happened when I clipped a tuft of grass next to the road and badly flipped the car. The battery pack worked loose and disconnected (there's a plug) from the car. Now freed of my commands, because the radio receiver no longer worked, the car roared off down the road but fortunately got wedged in the long grass on the other side. Range drops with battery power too, so you might go past the edge of radio range without expecting to.
The gadget that stops this behaviour is known as a "fail-safe", which returns the throttle servo to a zero position when it's not receiving a radio signal. ToyRange sell one suitable for this car for AUD $25, or you can make one yourself if you're clever (there's guides on the net). If you drive your car near real cars, or other people who could be hurt by it smacking into them at 60km/h, you should really consider a failsafe.
Drive time depends on how rich the car is running and your driving style, of course. With my "full throttle all the time and powerslide out of trouble" approach, I could get 20-25 minutes from a full tank of fuel. I've lost count of how many tankfuls I've run through the car and I still have half my $15 bottle of fuel left, so it's pretty good value there.
Conclusions
I've been having a ball with this car. If you're thinking of buying one for a smallish child, bear in mind that it's not really a good option for a complete beginner to RC cars. The initial setup is a little tricky, in that you have to get various extra things, run the car in, adjust the mixture etc, but it's not too difficult. Bits of it also become extremely hot - there's a real petrol engine in there, remember, and the exhaust pipe is hot enough for serious burns after a good run. There is some noise, but it's not excessive - not as loud as mowing your lawn, although your neighbours will probably still hear it and wonder if there's a giant, angry mosquito on the prowl. Also bear in mind that you do need a fair bit of flat space to get the most from an on-road car like this. Most important of all, it's surprisingly quick. Better to learn on a slower car before risking smashing this one to a million peices.
However, if you have some electric RC car experience and are thinking of making the move to nitro, this car seems ideal and quite a bargain. As for myself, despite my earlier bias towards electric cars, I can definitely see the appeal of nitro now. My two electric buggies are sadly neglected for the moment - thanks to the Smartech, I've become a bit of a nitro addict.
ToyRange have the Winner 1 as reviewed here for $319 AUD including the remote controller. You get everything you need in the box apart from glow plug igniter, batteries and nitro fuel. 4 AA batteries are needed for the car, 8 more are needed for the controller. Consider buying their fail-safe for $AUD 25, it's cheap insurance.
Thanks to boky for taking the action photos!
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