Behind the Wheel: Racing and Crawling Although they specialize in R/C cars and trucks, Newred Hobbies, located in the heart of Ocala, provides everything an R/C hobbyist might want or need, including planes, helicopters, quads, boats, submarines and trains. In addition to selling R/C products, Newred’s owner, Melanie Hitchcock, has built several off-road tracks designed to challenge even the most experienced car and truck hobbyists. “Melanie owns the shop, and I help handle the day-to-day operations,” explains her husband, Tom. We offer one of the very few indoor off-road dirt tracks in the state. The clay, BMX-style track is housed inside our 7,000-square-foot warehouse. It’s 120 feet long, 50 feet wide and has 10-foot-wide lanes. It has 30-foot jumps, straightaways and tight turns that are found on BMX tracks. Our outside track is an off-road, dirt, oval, banked track designed much like a NASCAR track, and we now also have a large rock-crawler/scaler track available for truck crawling. We try to offer a bit of something for everyone.” Tom says off-road tracks are made of dirt or clay and on-road tracks are usually surfaced with asphalt. Due to the high speeds attained by the cars and trucks (some run between 50 and 80mph), tires tend to wear out very quickly on on-road tracks, so in order to save hobbyists money, they have gone exclusively to dirt tracks where tires last much longer. At Newred, business is booming, and the Hitchcocks say they see nothing but a bright future for R/C car and truck racing and crawling. “A lot of people have no idea just how popular racing and crawling is today,” Tom says. “It’s almost like a secret society. We may have an event and two or three hundred spectators may show up. We’re a block back off the main highway, and I think if we were closer and people were more aware of us, there would be even more.” Tom attributes the popularity of model car and truck racing to the new battery and motor designs. “There’s no doubt about it, the LiPo batteries are what make these new electric cars and trucks so great. They are very low maintenance and easy to use,” says Tom. “A few years ago, the batteries lasted about five minutes, and then you had to charge them for three or four hours; now you can run your vehicle continuously for more than an hour and be fully charged up in 30 minutes. And also, the new electric motors are just as powerful as the nitro-powered ones.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 13:10:28 +0000
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