Hi guys. Greetings from Malta.
Sosidge. I don't mind answering your question at all.
My Dunlop business is my actual means of living, keeping a family, and seeing to my expensive hobbies - racing real cars and playing with big motorbikes. The model shop is a part time job though I bet I hold more stock in RC car spares and electrics than all the local model shops put together.
Yes, you are right, the RC shop pays for my hobby basically....and keeps everybody racing thanks to my stock of bits. I'm afraid that sometimes it gets like a charitable institution, people come to me for stuff if they can't afford to buy it and need credit, but order stuff themselves direct if they have the cash. That's how nice people are. But it doesn't bother me much - a sale is a sale, and having been bitten too many times I am giving far less credit nowadays.
I do RC because I enjoy it. I'm not the quickest - at my age I never will be, though thanks to my experience building real race cars, I think I prepare the best cars for myself, my son, and some selected customers. A Tamiya I prepared last year for a customer who had never won a Tamiya Cup race previously, won almost every race it ran under my guidance, eventually winning the Tamiya Cup championship. I didn't get much in the way of thanks for it though.
My son's TC3 is pretty unbeatable and has been for a while. In fact I can say that this season he has won every race in which he hasn't either had some form of failure, or been taken out - usually when lapping backmarkers, and not always accidentally either. In fact his three failures have been a broken diff once, and stones trapped between wishbones and chassis twice. The last of these was last Sunday, when he noticed the handling deteriorate. He brought the car into the pit road. I removed the offending stone, put the car back on track in a solid last place, then he just drove like a man possessed, having lost a couple of laps in the pits, and he still finished 3rd. just 3 seconds from the second man. MR4 Malta can confirm this. He was in the same race.
My Yoke is always blindingly fast in a straight line, and it handles too - it wins when Josh drives it, but of course my problem is my brain to thumb coordination - or lack of it.
Yes, I enjoy it and can boast that the club has improved and grown under my presidency much more than it ever did previously.
But I enjoy it, and that's all that counts. Results are a secondary bonus.
regards
Joe from sunny Malta.